[10:34 am, 06/11/2022] Harry Whorwood: I remember my Mother preparing this. I declined the brains on toast, which she subsequently bought from the Market Hall. From the Delegraph, with acknowledgement.

“SIR – Cooking a sheep’s head (Letters, November 4) may well be a Norwegian speciality but it was also popular in Birmingham in the early 1950s, when meat was still rationed.

I remember my mother returning from the meat market on a Saturday evening with this delicacy. The brains would be removed and soaked in salt water overnight to remove the blood. They were then poached and served on toast. The rest of the head was cooked to remove the meat, which was used to overfill a basin and covered with a saucer, weighted with a flat iron, producing a pressed meat.

This supplied sandwiches for the following week. Nothing wasted.

David Law
Salisbury, Wiltshire”
[10:34 am, 06/11/2022] Harry Whorwood: Graham – I heard of it but never saw or ate it. Now I do remember my grandmother making Head Cheese. She would get a pigs head or just an eye piece and soak it in the sink. From that she made what I called Potted Meat. Delicious. I few years ago I was talking to a school friend who lives in Hamburg. During the conversation he asked if my grandmother was German (God forbid) as he saw that type of sandwich meat in Germany.

What’s surprising is that I can buy head cheese here in Louisiana (as well as frog legs) at grocery stores – and I do. Not as good as granny Short’s, of course.
[10:35 am, 06/11/2022] Harry Whorwood: All of which started me thinking. My Mother helped out a friend of hers in plucking turkeys for a number of Christmases which left me with the question of where she got the expertise from. Which led to the memory of her buying our Christmas chicken (at the turn of the 40’s/50’s) and storing it in the shed, hanging upside down to bleed. A day or two before the day she would pluck it and then singe the feather cores with the gas taper from the stove. Later on we joined up with the new fangled fad of Turkey from the US which became transportable due to the new chiller ships across the Atlantic.
[10:36 am, 06/11/2022] Harry Whorwood: But that didn’t explain why the sisters, for example, knew how to make brawn. The clue may lie in Walter who was a butcher – and in this Ian is right to be sceptical as to his butchery provenance or skill.

At least one census for their residence prior to Solihull
Road on oops – Stratford Road, Sparkhill, shown them living above the butcher’s shop – Crutchley’s? Walter in a previous census is shown as working for the Avon tyre company, then he magically describes. himself as a butcher, and he then morphs into a “Journeyman Butcher” or in the modern parlance a butcher’s white van man. I believe that modern butchers are given/expect as a perk unlimited meat from their employer for their own use. So maybe that explains the Rayboulds skill/expertise in dealing with meat cuts.