Daphne Jones is carrying on a tradition that is deeply personal, and at the same time, ancient and universal. She is making headcheese. “There is a recipe for it all over the world.”
Glorious Malone’s Fine Sausage makes headcheese from hog snouts and ears. “Then we spice it up,” says Jones. “Throw some love in there.”
Daphne says the end result is not just sustenance, “Head cheese makes some people’s minds think of all kinds of things. But if I can present it to you, ‘This is our gourmet pork delicacy,’ you might be able to say, ‘Okay I can give that a try.’ So sometimes you have to use language to help people to move to the next step.”
Jones’s parents, George and Glorious Malone, came from the south to Milwaukee and brought their headcheese recipe with them. “During the holiday season, they made this product for friends and relatives as a gift. I think my parents actually started to say to themselves, ‘We’re making it so much, I wonder if we could really sell it.’ And so they did.”
Eventually the Malone’s opened a grocery store on 6th and Hadley, in a thriving African-American neighborhood. “It was the neighborhood store that was also part of everybody’s family and the family’s part of the store.”
Eventually Daphne came back to help her mother run the factory. “I believe in the beginning, my intention was for the legacy not to die, for it not to fail. I don’t want all of these decades to have been for nothing. After my mother passed, I decided to rename it and call it ‘Glorious Malone’s Fine Sausage‘ because it had two meanings. It was her name, Glorious and it is a glorious product, right?”
