How To Cook A Wolf

Because of my rather silly love of cookbooks from the 1930s-1950s, I just had to check this book out from the library. How to Cook a Wolf is M. F. K. Fisher's work on eating, cooking, and surviving with gusto during the food rationing of WWII.

Some of her recipes were just downright unappetizing and bizarre, such as this one for head cheese copied verbatim from pages 102-103:

Aunt Gwen's Cold Shape (!)

1 calf head, quartered

salt, pepper, bay, herbs as desired

1/2 cup lemon juice

or

1 cup dry white wine

Remove most of fat, and the brains (save for another dish), ears, eyes, and snout (a kindly butcher will do this for the finicky). Soak for 1/2 hour in cold water, wash off, cover with cold water, and simmer until the meat starts to fall from the bones. Drain in large colander over another kettle, saving all the cooking liquor. Dice the meat ("in pretty pieces," Aunt Gwen directed), add the stock amply to cover, and mix gently with seasoning to taste. Simmer for 3/4 hour, add the lemon juice or wine, and pour into a mold. Cover with a cloth, weight well, and chill. Serve in slices. (Aunt Gwen used bread-pans for the molds, clean bricks for the weights ... and there were always cucumber-chips on the platter.)

Yes, you read correctly: head cheese. Soaking a calves head to get all the meat and fat off the bones and turning it into some kind of morbid delicacy.

My mother told me stories about her grandpa, who came from Austria-Hungary in 1921, and absolutely loved the homemade head cheese that my grandma made for him. There was even mention of my grandma shaving the head to get all the hairs off the skin so there would be none in the vat of gelatinous goo that was to become the aforementioned ... "treat." If it was served with cold cucumber slices, I may never know.
I think this is actually an ad for pork sausage. But regardless, I feel that the same strange .. mood, perhaps (?) is there.
Unfortunately, I do not know what year this fabulous illustration of two multi-course meals comes from. But on the left hand side, at the very top, that strange cylindrical tallow-colored cake is really head cheese. A polite term for it in society would be brawn, or possibly, braun. Supposedly there is no end to the mold-shapes you can form your loaves or cakes of head cheese into.