Don’t turn up your nose at fromage de tête, more widely available in France than in Britain or, I imagine, the US, but still a traditional dish wherever people eat pork.
« You can eat all of a pig but its squeal.” (I was sure that we used to say “You can eat all of a pig but its whistle,” but can find no evidence to confirm this conviction.) I imagine every pork-eating culture has a similar old saw, the French version is “Tout est bon dans le cochon,” which is less colourful than the English version but does have the advantage of rhyming.
Use your head
The major challenge after you’ve butchered your pig, fed the genitals to the dogs and saved the blood for black pudding, is surely what to do with the head.
You can salt the ears. They were on sale, along with the tails and trotters, on Portuguese stalls when I used to shop at Champigny market. If your Italian, you can cure the cheeks to make guanciale. Some tripiers (butchers who specialise in offal, who are more common in the cities than around here, strangely) sell pigs’ brains, a dish that is definitely not for the squeamish or those concerned about their cholesterol level. But why not use the whole damn thing?
Well, you can if you make fromage de tête. This is far from being an exclusively French recipe, the English version sometimes being referred to as head cheese but more usually called brawn.
But, given that English-speaking culture feels it necessary to change the name of the animal when it is prepared for the table, dishes that ostentatiously declare what part of the body they are composed of face a certain amount of food-prudery.
Not so in France, where fromage de tête is sold by all self-respecting charcutiers and freely available in supermarkets.
I’m pretty sure that one of France’s favourite films, Les Tontons flingeurs, has a scene where Jean Gabin, as a senior gangster, shows a colleague how to prepare the dish, combining, as I remember it, folksiness and menace. I can’t find a clip of it, however, so here’s a video of how to prepare fromage de tête the French way. Apparently there are regional variations regarding what herbs to use and whether to add juniper berries – common in eastern France, it seems.
Recipes, with or without video, are available in English should you feel motivated to make your own brawn.
Cut out waste and boost your vitamins
One good reason to tuck into a pig’s head is to reduce waste. In France nearly four million tonnes of edible foodstuffs are thrown away every year and, even here, much of that is caused by items discarded for “aesthetic” reasons.
Another reason, advanced by nose-to-tail eating advocates, is that, having killed an animal for food, it’s only courtesy to eat it in its entirety. Plus the dish is rich in vitamins and potassium.
As with tête de veau (calf’s head), you have to like the gelatinous to appreciate fromage de tête. The texture makes a fine contrast with nice, crunchy pickles.
Factory-farms of 20,000 pigs
Conscientious carnivores should, however, pay attention to where their pork products come from.
Animal rights campaigners have brought to light several scandals concerning conditions in slaughter-houses and pig farms, for example the farm that was recently fined a modest amount by a court in Châlons-en-Champagne for brutal practices, including castration without anaesthetic, killing potentially unprofitable piglets by bashing their brains out on the ground, removing tails and teeth with pliers, and failing to treat animals with abscesses and hernias .
These abuses are generally found on industrial-scale farms that raise thousands of pigs to supply supermarkets. The farm that found itself in court, thanks to the campaign group L214, was raising 20,000 pigs.
Every now and then fires break out in these food factories. On New Year’s Day this year 1,032 pigs were roasted alive when just one of three sheds in a farm near Béthune in northern France caught fire.
Last year L214 filed legal complaints alleging “structural cruelty” against farms supplying the ELeclerc chain of supermarkets and accused two suppliers of Lidl of “flagrant breaches of regulations” in 2024.
These outfits were in Brittany, the epicentre of industrial pork production in France. The region produces 56% of the country’s pork, that’s 1,258 million tonnes, in 5,166 farms. The trade is worth 2.3 billion euros a year. There are only 100 organic farms there. In the Côtes d’Armor département there are four pigs for every human.
According to the Welfarm campaign, 95% of France’s pigs are raised in intensive farming, crowded into bare sties and prevented from going to feed in the open air. Sixty per cent are concentrated in just three per cent of farms, according to Greenpeace, which points out the massive pollution and health risks they are responsible for.
Admittedly no French producer has reached the heights attained by the Chinese establishment that was reported to be raising 650,000 pigs in a 26 storey-building near Wuhan.
However the agribusiness lobby is powerful in France. Critics of the hyperactive “farmers’ union”, the FNSEA, point out that its president, Arnaud Rousseau, spends little time ploughing furrows or feeding livestock, being the chairman of the agro-industrial group Avril and on the boards of several other companies. He claims there is no intensive animal farming in France.
Rousseau’s deputy, Jérôme Despey, chairs the organisation that runs the Salon de l’agriculture, the much-publicised annual event in Paris where the sitting president and lesser politicians feign an interest in prize bulls in front of the TV cameras.
Ethical(ish) eating is possible
But small-scale producers do exist. I asked the woman who sells pork on the country market at Bletterans how many pigs she had on her family farm; 50-60 was the reply. And the meat she sells actually tastes of pig (in a good way), ten time better than the bland pap you buy in a supermarket.
Another local producer, owners of the immodestly titled “Best pig in the world”, boasts that their pigs are raised in the open air, free, like Spain’s famous pata negra, to wander in the woods where they feed on leaves, acorns and berries.
Their website features charming photos of happy pigs and boasts that they abstain from several widespread practices such as castration (principally carried out to prevent the meat of mature boars having a taste and smell to which some people object), putting a ring in the nose (to avoid churning up soil, only necessary when the pigs don’t have enough space, according to the site), killing off weedy piglets, drawing teeth, cutting tails, and artificial insemination (let nature take its course!).
So is possible to buy the meat of pigs that have lived the kind of life a swine might enjoy, although, obviously, that life has to be brought to a premature end in to get it to your table.
And these methods, along with the reduction of waste, can reduce the environmental harm caused by industrial-level meat production. But food production is responsible for about a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. So, let’s face it, the enormous demand for meat, which is the major contributor, will continue to be a threat to the planet’s future.
