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Baked Calf's Head
Boil the head till very tender, then cut up, putting into a deep dish. Rub together a spoonful of butter and flour, adding salt, pepper, cloves and thyme. Then add a wineglass of wine, and some of the water in which the head was boiled. Mix well through the meat; sprinkle the top with cracker crumbs and bake nicely. Garnish with parsley and sliced lemon.
A late-Victorian way of using up a boiled calf's head: the meat is cut from the bone, bound in a light spiced gravy, crumbed and browned. The method transfers cleanly to any gelatinous cut; the head itself is the hard part.
- Sourcing the headCalf's head is a special order from a whole-animal butcher, usually split and with the brain removed. Under BSE rules the skull and brain of older cattle are classed as specified risk material — over twelve months in the UK and EU, thirty months and over in the US — so only heads from genuinely young animals may legally be sold, and many butchers will not handle them at all.
- A workable substituteFor the same texture without the head, use 3 lb of veal or beef cheeks, or a mix of shin and a split trotter for body. Simmer until the meat pulls apart, then proceed from "cut up".
- "Till very tender"A whole head takes 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, cheeks about the same. Skim often. Do not boil hard or the collagen clouds the broth and the meat shreds to threads.
- A wineglassAbout 2 fl oz in period usage. Sherry or Madeira suits the cloves and thyme better than table wine.
- The sauceA spoonful each of butter and flour is roughly 1 tablespoon each, enough to thicken about a cup of liquid. Use the wine plus enough of the cooking broth to make the mixture loose — it firms considerably as the gelatin cools, and a stiff sauce bakes to paste.
- ClovesGround, and sparing: a scant ¼ teaspoon for this quantity. Whole cloves left in the dish are unpleasant to bite.
- "Bake nicely"A moderate oven, around 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes, until the crumbs are browned and the edges bubble. The recipe itself gives no temperature. The meat is already cooked; this step is only for colour and to set the sauce. Dot the crumbs with butter or they will stay pale and dusty.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs would usually have meant plain soda or water crackers. Unsalted-top saltines or dried breadcrumbs both work; taste the sauce for salt before topping.
- YieldA calf's head yields a surprising amount — 8 to 10 servings. The cheek and tongue meat is the best of it; reserve the tongue, peel it while warm and slice it in with the rest.
Calf's head was a fixture of English and American cookery from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth, valued because it delivered a large quantity of rich, gelatinous meat for very little money. It underpinned mock turtle soup, where the gelatinous skin was made to stand in for green turtle, and it turned up boiled, hashed, collared, and — as here — baked in a crumbed gravy, which is essentially a way of reheating yesterday's boiled head into something presentable. The lemon and parsley garnish is not decoration alone: acid cuts the richness of the gelatin, and the same pairing appears with boiled head throughout nineteenth-century cookbooks. Dishes like this went into steep decline in American home cooking after the First World War, as butchering moved out of the neighbourhood shop and offal lost its place at the middle-class table, though calf's head recipes persisted in American cookbooks into the interwar decades and beyond; the later restrictions on bovine skull material in the wake of BSE narrowed the supply further, without ending the dish altogether.