Home › The Principles of Cookery › Calf's Ears and Tomato Sauce
Calf's Ears and Tomato Sauce
Scald the ears for some minutes, dry them, and singe the hair off carefully. Rub them well with lemon juice, and stew in some stock for about two hours. When tender, scrape off any soft skin with the back of a knife. Lay them in a marinade of oil, vinegar, and chopped parsley and onions, for half an hour, and reheat in a pint of tomato sauce, to which the marinade may be added if desired.
A late-Victorian offal dish that survives mainly in Continental butchery. The method is sound; the difficulty is now sourcing rather than technique.
- Sourcing the earsCalf ears are likely to be a special order from a halal, kosher or whole-animal butcher, and may come already scalded and scraped; if so, ask for them cleaned and the singeing step can be skipped. Pig ears are more widely available and behave similarly, though they are fattier.
- SingeingIf the ears arrive with bristles, the traditional method is a brief pass over an open gas flame or a blowtorch, then a scrape with a knife. Wet hair will not singe, which is why the recipe insists on drying them first.
- The two-hour stew is the hingeEar is almost entirely cartilage and collagen. Undercooked it is squeaky and unpleasant; the two hours of gentle simmering in stock is what turns it gelatinous and yielding. Test with a skewer, and give it longer if there is any resistance. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a boil or the outer skin shreds.
- Stock quantityThe original does not say how much. Use enough to cover, roughly 1.5 to 2 quarts for four ears, and top up as it reduces. The strained liquid is heavily gelatinous and worth keeping for sauces.
- Lemon juice rubThis is partly a whitening step, the same logic as blanching sweetbreads, and partly to counter any lingering smell. It is not a marinade and does not need time to work.
- MarinadeHalf an hour in oil, vinegar and aromatics is short by design; the ear is already cooked and the marinade is for surface flavour. A ratio of three parts oil to one part vinegar suits the richness. Adding it to the tomato sauce, as suggested, sharpens what would otherwise be a heavy dish.
- YieldFigure one ear per person as a starter, two as a main course. A pint of tomato sauce comfortably serves four.
Calf's ears belong to a class of gelatinous cuts — ears, feet, tails, muzzle — that Victorian and Edwardian cookery treated as ordinary provisions rather than curiosities. Compendia of the period seem to have run through them methodically, since a household buying meat by the carcass or from a butcher who wasted nothing needed instruction on all of it. The pairing with tomato sauce, and the intermediate step of a vinegar-and-oil marinade, points to French practice: oreilles de veau appear in the classic repertoire crumbed and fried, in a gratin, or sauced, and the marinade is the standard trick for lifting a cut whose flavour is mild to the point of blankness. Tomato sauce itself may still have carried a faint air of novelty in British books of this period, tomatoes having moved from greenhouse luxury to reliable market produce over the course of the nineteenth century. Such cuts fell out of British domestic cooking in the twentieth century as meat came pre-portioned, though ears of one kind or another are often said to have kept their place in other cuisines.