Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Calf's Head Soup
Prepare a calf's head, take out the brains. To this add one gallon of water. Boil until it comes to pieces, take out all the bones, return this to the vessel, adding one tablespoonful of butter, one small teacup of browned flour, one teacup of tomato catsup, one tablespoonful of allspice, one nutmeg grated. Season with salt and pepper to the taste. When soup is nearly ready for the table, fry and add the brains. A few minutes before serving add one teacup of wine, one small teaspoonful of cloves and same of mace. When placed in tureen, slice lemon thin and lay on top of soup, or hard-boiled eggs are an addition.
A late-Victorian mock-turtle style soup that depends on gelatin drawn from a whole calf's head. Almost everything here is workable in a modern kitchen except the head itself and the brains, both of which now need a conversation with a butcher.
- The hinge: cook it to collapse"Boil until it comes to pieces" is the whole method — the head needs a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, for roughly 3 to 4 hours until the meat slips from the bone and the liquid is thick with gelatin. A hard boil clouds the broth and toughens the tongue and cheek meat.
- Sourcing the headA split, cleaned calf's head is a special order from a halal, kosher or Hispanic butcher, or a whole-animal shop; expect 6 to 10 lb. Cooks who cannot get one build the same body from 3 lb veal shank plus a split veal knuckle or two calf's feet, which supply the gelatin the head would have given.
- Brains and current regulationBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material under BSE rules in the US, UK and EU, and cannot legally be sold from older cattle; even where young-calf brain is permitted, most butchers will not stock it. Omit the fried brains — the soup is complete without them — and do not substitute brain from an unknown source.
- Teacup and gillTeacup -- A teacup in recipes of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup (6 fl oz) rather than a modern measuring cup, though the convention varies from book to book. That gives something like 3/4 cup of browned flour (the recipe says a *small* teacup), 3/4 cup ketchup and 3/4 cup wine into a gallon of broth.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet or a low oven until it is the color of cinnamon. It thickens far less than raw flour, which is why the quantity looks large; whisk it to a slurry with cool broth before adding or it will lump.
- Spice quantitiesA tablespoon of allspice plus a whole grated nutmeg, then cloves and mace at the end, is Victorian-heavy. Start with a teaspoon of allspice and half a nutmeg and taste; the spices are meant to echo turtle soup, not dominate it.
- The wine"Wine" in a soup of this date usually meant sherry or Madeira, though claret and other wines also turn up. Add it off the boil in the last few minutes so it does not cook flat.
- Skim itA calf's head gives up a great deal of fat. Skim during the simmer, and if you have time, chill the strained broth and lift the solid cap before finishing the soup.
- YieldA gallon of liquid plus the head meat serves 10 to 12 as a first course. The lemon slices and sliced hard-boiled egg go into the tureen at the last moment.
Calf's head soup is the honest ancestor of mock turtle soup: real green turtle was a luxury of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century banquets, and a long-simmered calf's head gave the same gelatinous, faintly gluey body and a similar spread of soft and firm textures at a fraction of the cost. The spicing here — allspice, nutmeg, cloves, mace, a browned-flour thickening, catsup for color and acid, and sherry stirred in at the end — is the standard turtle-soup formula of the period, with lemon and sliced hard-boiled egg as the traditional garnish. That the recipe opens by telling the cook to set the brains aside and fry them separately is a reminder that brains were eaten in their own right, as a delicacy rather than a salvaged scrap, and that a butcher would sell you the whole head without comment. Head cookery of this kind faded from American home books over the following century, hastened in its last stages by BSE regulation restricting the use of brain and spinal cord, though such restrictions are tied to the age of the animal and brain from young calves remains legal in some jurisdictions.