Faggots are British offal meatballs: pig’s liver and heart minced with fatty pork, onion, breadcrumbs and sage, shaped into balls the size of a small fist, each wrapped in a square of caul fat, then baked in a dish of onion gravy. They are the sausage family with the casing taken away — the caul holds the shape while they are raw and then melts, basting them as they cook. What separates a faggot from a crépinette, its French cousin, is the liver: a faggot is a liver dish first, dark, soft and savoury, served with mashed potatoes and mushy or marrowfat peas. They come from the cheap country cooking of the English West Country and Midlands, spread with farm workers into the mines and steelworks of South Wales in the nineteenth century, and were a rationing staple in the Second World War. Brain’s frozen faggots in gravy, from a Bristol butcher, kept them on British supper tables for decades after. The name means a bundle, as in a faggot of sticks. I have not made these yet; the formula is built from standard British and Welsh faggot recipes and is untested.
Ingredients
MEAT (about 1,350 g / 3 lb)
- 450 g (1 lb) pig’s liver, membrane and tubes removed
- 225 g (8 oz) pig’s heart, trimmed
- 675 g (1½ lb) fatty pork belly, skinless, or pork shoulder with 30% fat
BINDER AND SEASONING
- 2 medium onions, 300 g (10 oz), finely chopped and sweated in butter, then cooled
- 120 g (4 oz) fresh white breadcrumbs
- 1 large egg
- 22 g (3¾ tsp) fine salt — about 1.4% of the mix
- 4 g (2 tsp) black pepper
- 2 g (2 tsp) dried sage, or 8 g fresh, chopped
- 1 g (½ tsp) mace
- 0.5 g (¼ tsp) ground allspice
WRAPPING AND GRAVY
- 350 g (12 oz) pig’s caul fat, approximately
- 750 ml (3 cups) onion gravy — the collection’s Brown Onion Gravy, or beef stock thickened with a roux
Directions
Key ingredients
- In the collection: pig’s liver and caul. Bake them in Brown Onion Gravy. The French relative without the liver is Crépinettes.
- Soften the caul: soak the caul in lukewarm salted water for 10 minutes. Cold caul tears; warm caul stretches and you can see the lace open up.
- Mince: chill the meats and grind through a 6 mm (1/4”) plate — liver, heart and belly together so the liver spreads evenly. Liver is wet and smears if it is warm; keep it near freezing.
- Mix: add onion, breadcrumbs, egg and seasonings and mix until even. The mixture will be soft and sloppy; that is normal for faggots, and the caul is there to hold it. Chill it 30 minutes so it can be shaped.
- Taste: fry a teaspoon to 71 °C. Faggots should be savoury, peppery and sage-scented with the liver present but not bitter. More onion and pepper are the fixes for too much liver.
- Wrap: spread the caul on the board and cut into 15 cm (6 in) squares. Shape 100 g balls with wet hands, set each on a square and fold the caul round it, overlapping underneath. One layer of caul is enough; a double layer leaves a chewy skin.
- Bake: pack them seam-side down, touching, in a buttered baking dish. Bake uncovered at 190 °C / 375 °F for 20 minutes to brown the tops, then pour the hot gravy round them to come halfway up, cover with foil and bake 25–30 minutes more, until the centres reach 71 °C / 160 °F.
- Serve: with mashed potatoes, mushy or marrowfat peas, and plenty of the gravy. They reheat well the next day.
Notes
Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t. There is no single authoritative faggot formula; this follows the common shape of English and Welsh butchers’ recipes — roughly a third liver, the rest heart and fatty pork, bread and onion to bind, sage and pepper to season, caul to wrap, baked in gravy. The proportions (liver 33% of the meat, heart 17%, belly 50%) and the mace and allspice are a judgement, not a published standard. Untested.
Where faggots came from. They are cottage food from the parts of England where every household kept a pig: west Wiltshire, the West Midlands and the Black Country. When a pig was killed, the liver, heart and scraps had to be eaten within days, and minced with bread and wrapped in the pig’s own caul they made a meal for a family. In the mid-nineteenth century the dish moved with farm workers into the industrial valleys of South Wales, where it is still common, often with peas as “faggots and peas”. In Yorkshire and Lancashire the same thing is called a “savoury duck”; that name appears in the Manchester Courier on 3 June 1843. Faggots became a wartime standby under rationing because offal was not rationed. From the 1930s the Bristol butcher Herbert Hill Brain made them commercially, and Mr Brain’s faggots in West Country sauce, sold frozen in their own oven tray, kept the dish in British supermarkets.
The name. From faggot, a bundle of sticks bound together; the dish is a bundle of scraps bound in caul. The word has an unrelated slur meaning in American English; in Britain it is still printed on supermarket packs.
Variations. Older recipes often include pig’s lights (lungs) as well — not permitted in US food. Some recipes use lamb’s liver, or replace half the bread with oatmeal. Gravy-free faggots are baked dry and served cold.
Sourcing and gear. Pig’s liver and caul come from Asian and Latin markets and whole-hog butchers; caul freezes well. If no caul can be had, bake the balls touching in the gravy and they will hold together, though they will not brown the same way.
Still open. The 1843 “savoury duck” reference and Brain’s founding date have not been checked against primary documents.
Read more on the site. Patties and Bulk · The Family Tree