Brawn

Brawn is something which I don’t think is very popular any more, but which I remember from my childhood. As I remember it, and I looked it, it was cooked pork in a flavoursome gel, but not too much gel, just enough to hold it together. Later I think I realised ti wa made from the unpopular and cheap parts of a pig, and when I was looking at recipes I found it was chiefly made from pig’s head and cheeks, pig’s trotters and pig’s tails. This didn’t really bother me, I like pork wherever it comes from.

However when I was looking through the Round the Clock Cookery Book, published mid 1930’s, I found there were different brawns. The word might give an answer to whether brawn is pork or other meat or fish; the word is over seven hundred years old and comes from the Old French word brawn which very specifically means the fleshy or muscular part of an animal, particularly the buttock; the word variously means ham or roast or tender meat. I sort of means cooked flesh, cooked in different ways; however, the specific sense of it being boar’s flesh is just an English thing.

In the cookery book I found curried brawn, fish brawn, veal brawn, ham and beef brawn as well as pig’s head brawn. All of them have the same feature; the meat of whichever animal, chiefly cheap cuts, covered in liquor which sets into a jelly.