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Sauce For Calf's Head
Add to "drawn-butter sauce "the brains mashed fine, a teaspoonful of powdered sage, a pinch of cayenne pepper and salt. To this add one glass of Madeira wine.
A compound sauce meant to be served with the boiled calf's head it came from, in the old pattern where nothing from the head was wasted. The original assumes you already know what "drawn-butter sauce" is and that the brains have been cooked separately.
- The brains must already be cookedNothing in this sauce cooks them. In period practice the brains were soaked in several changes of cold water, the membrane and blood vessels pulled away, then poached gently in salted, acidulated water for about 15 minutes and cooled before mashing. Adding raw brain to a warm butter sauce will not bring it to a safe temperature.
- Sourcing calf brains todayBovine brain is regulated as specified risk material because of BSE. In the EU the skull and brain of cattle over 12 months may not enter the food chain, and in the US brain from cattle 30 months and older is prohibited. Buy only from an inspected butcher who can confirm the animal's age; do not use brain of unknown origin.
- Drawn-butter sauceNot clarified butter. It is the period's basic white sauce: roughly 2 tbsp butter worked with 1 tbsp flour, thinned with about a cup of hot water or the liquid the head was boiled in, and simmered until smooth and lightly thickened.
- A glass of MadeiraA wineglassful in period measure is usually reckoned about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Against a cup of butter sauce that is still a wet, winey proportion. Start with 2 tbsp, taste, and add more; if you use the full measure, let the sauce simmer a few minutes to lose the raw alcohol and re-thicken.
- Powdered sageDried sage ground fine, rather than the coarser, fluffier rubbed sage. A scant teaspoon in a cup of sauce is plenty.
- Madeira substitutesUse a dry to medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho). Sweet Malmsey will read as cloying here. Dry sherry is the closest common stand-in.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter to a cup and a half depending on how much wine goes in, enough for one calf's head or, in practice, for four to six servings of any boiled or braised meat.
Calf's head was a serious set piece in nineteenth-century cookery on both sides of the Atlantic: boiled whole, it yielded the gelatinous cheek and skin, the tongue, the eyes, and the brains, and it was the basis of mock turtle soup, which imitated the texture of real green turtle with exactly this material. Serving the brains back as a sauce for the head follows the standard logic of the period's economy cooking, where an offal item too delicate to stand alone was turned into an enrichment. The Madeira dates the recipe as much as the sage does. Madeira was fortified for long sea voyages and travelled well in the American trade, making it the everyday cooking wine of genteel English and American kitchens through the 1800s.