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CALF'S HEAD (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Take the remains of a cold calf's head, and cut it into neat slices, leaving out the bones, etc. Make some maitre d'hotel sauce, consisting of half a pint of good melted butter, mixed with two dessert-spoonfuls of parsley boiled and chopped, the juice of a small lemon, and a little salt and pepper. Let this boil, then put in the pieces of calf's head, let them become quite heated, without boiling, and serve on a hot dish, garnished with sippets of toast.
A Victorian re-heat dish for leftovers from a boiled calf's head, and it hinges on one piece of period vocabulary that trips up nearly everyone.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not butterIn nineteenth-century English cookery, melted butter means a white roux-based butter sauce — roughly an ounce each of butter and flour cooked together, then loosened with water, milk or the head's cooking liquor to a pouring consistency. Plain liquid butter will not hold the lemon juice and will slide off the meat.
- Half a pintImperial measure, so 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups of finished sauce. The recipe does not say how much cold meat it is meant to dress, only "the remains" of a head.
- Dessert-spoonfulsA dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon: about 2 teaspoons. Four teaspoons of chopped parsley in total, which is a generous but correct amount for maître d'hôtel.
- Boiling the parsleyBlanching the parsley for under a minute before chopping sets the colour and takes off the raw edge. Squeeze it dry or the sauce will thin.
- Add the lemon off the boilNote that the recipe puts the lemon juice in before the sauce is boiled. A long hard boil with acid can thin a flour-thickened sauce, so if you prefer you can stir the juice in as the sauce comes off the heat.
- Do not boil the meatThis is the point of the recipe. The head is already cooked and gelatinous; a second boil shreds it and clouds the sauce. Bring the pan to just below a simmer and hold it there for three or four minutes until heated through.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast or fried bread, arranged around the rim of the dish. Cut them thin so they stay crisp against the sauce.
- SourcingCalf's head is a butcher's order in most places now and is banned or restricted in some markets. Cooked, boned head meat from a good charcutier, or a firm unset brawn, behaves the same way in the pan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of meat or number of servings; this amount of sauce would suit a small dish for about four.
Maître d'hôtel treatment has stayed remarkably stable: butter, parsley, lemon, salt and pepper, either worked cold into a pat or, as here, folded into a warm sauce. The dish sits among the calf's head recipes because a whole boiled head was an economical Victorian buy that could feed a household twice — served hot on the first day, then sliced and reheated in something sharp on the second. The parsley and lemon are doing real work: head meat is rich, soft and heavily gelatinous, and the acid cuts it. The same logic gave the period its many mustard, piquante and vinaigrette treatments for cold head. Head cookery of this kind fell away in Britain across the twentieth century, in part because whole heads stopped appearing routinely on the butcher's slab.