Making Head Cheese at Midnight

My week reads like a calendar of meat handling events.
On Friday, the restaurant braised 300 pounds of beef cheeks for an off-site event, and I spent most of the evening removing the cheeks from their braising liquid. On Saturday, I carved seven enormous briskets (a whole brisket is actually made up of two separate pectoral muscles which are separated by slicing through the fatty layer that runs between them. In the supermarket you would usually buy the leaner and more attractive of these two muscles, the "first cut", but Cochon doesn't discriminate). On Monday, I sliced a substantial amount of bacon. Using the fancy commercial slicing machine, I had a Jewish New Yorker fantasy that I was working at Katz's Delicatessan, carving pastrami by hand. On a less Jewish note, during this fantasy I indulged in a piece of raw bacon. This brought back a childhood memory of catching Ella Sternberg's parents eating bacon straight from the package on Fire Island, an act that seemed to me at the time almost cannibalistic in its flesh-eating grotequeness (I think I ran home terrified). But this house-cured and house-smoked bacon was so beautifully red and marbled that I felt compelled to taste it fresh off the slicer and, hey, the Sternberg's may have been on to something--it had the delicateness of prosciutto, a sweetness from the brown sugar in the cure, and a deep smokiness common to all meat that spends time in Cochon's smoker.
These meaty toils reached a climax on Tuesday, when my final task of the evening was to assist Bill, Cochon's main meat man (he does the majority of the restaurant's butchering, curing, smoking and sausage-making), at making head cheese. Bill brought me a tray pan packed with several roasted pig heads and instructed me to tease them apart, discarding the bones and saving the meat and most of the skin. I must admit feeling a bit squeamish at first; there was something unsettling about the process of dismantling heads into their subparts, prying jaw bones full of teeth from their tongues, tearing chunks of meat from cheek cavities, separating ears from skulls and removing piggy snouts (to be chopped up and used in their entirety!). When the heads were broken down I was left with a pile of face, still vaguely reminiscent of a pig, in a Picassoesque sense. Joe, another cook, came by and hacked off a piece of tongue to munch on, so I girded my loins and followed suit and, WOW, pig tongue is delicious! Who knew. The meat has a unique softness and richness of flavor and, if you remove the outer membrane containing the taste buds, you would never guess it used to be a tongue.
As the head cheese story indicates, Cochon never fails to incorporate every last bit of the pig into its menu. Yesterday, to make use of an extra pork butt, Steven devised an impromptu menu special: slices of roasted pork with a mizuna salad, a fried yard egg (provided by a friend who has laying hens in his backyard) and a satsuma chili hollandaise sauce--a Cajun riff on eggs benedict?--which, in a moment of something approaching mentorship, Steven asked me to assist him in making. In lieu of the usual lemon juice base, we used a combination of vermouth, cider vinegar, and satsuma juice that gave the hollandaise a slightly sweet and citrusy flavor.
There is something deeply satisfying about the process of rendering an animal part, sometimes quite anatomically distinct at the outset, into an elegant menu item. To the mess of chopped up head meat Bill and I added scallion, parsley and seasonings, then poured the mixture into pans with a gelatin broth and chilled it into loaves of head cheese, served on the menu in delicate slices beneath a salad of mustard greens and garnished with crispy curls of fried pig ears. I heard a rumor that there used to be a pork tongue salad on the menu, too, and I'd like to find out the recipe and replicate it at some point in the future.