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 (a la Pompadour)
Boil and bone half a calf's head, and fill it with a stuffing made of the calf's brains, a gill of cream, the yolks of two eggs, a chopped mushroom, a little chopped ham, and a tiny pinch of cinnamon. Boil it in good stock, and when it is sufficiently cooked take it out and mask it is sufficiently cooked take it out and mask it all over with a mixture of butter, yolk of egg, and a table-spoonful of grated Parmesan, then brown it in the oven and serve hot.
This is a dish that cannot be reproduced today. The points below explain what in it is prohibited or dangerous, and how to read the original as a historical text rather than as instructions.
- The stuffing is the problemThe filling is built around the calf's brains. Bovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk material because they can carry the agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and there is no treatment, and no cooking temperature inactivates the prion.
- Not a matter of sourcingSince the BSE controls of the 1990s, bovine brain and spinal tissue from cattle over a set age have been banned from the human food chain in the UK, the EU and many other jurisdictions. A butcher who could sell it to you legally is not the situation in most of the world, and the risk is not one a careful supplier removes.
- The head itselfThe head itself — Heads from cattle over the specified age are restricted in many places because the skull encloses brain tissue and because splitting the head can spread it to the meat. Calf's head, once a staple of the butcher's slab, is now rare in British and American cookery, though its decline was well under way before the BSE controls.
- Make something elseIf you want the shape of the dish — a boned, stuffed, glazed and gratinated joint finished with Parmesan — work from a current recipe using shoulder or a boned rolled loin. Do not adapt this one.
- Reading the original: a gillReading the original: a gill — a gill is a quarter of a pint: about 142 ml by Imperial reckoning, or 118 ml (half a cup) by American measure.
- Reading the original: maskingTo "mask" is to coat a cooked joint all over with a thick sauce or paste before browning. The butter, egg yolk and Parmesan here form a gratin crust, the same logic as a modern glaçage.
- A duplicated lineA duplicated line — The phrase "is sufficiently cooked take it out and mask it" appears twice in the text as transmitted. It is a duplication rather than a second stage of the method; whether it arose in the original printing or in later transcription cannot be told from the text.
Calf's head was one of the great show pieces of the nineteenth-century kitchen, cheap in raw material and enormously laborious to prepare, which made it an ideal test of a cook's skill. The à la Pompadour tag belongs to the vast family of nineteenth-century garnish names borrowed from the French court: Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, lent her name to a range of dishes, and by Victorian times such labels functioned less as a documented lineage than as a promise of a particular style of finish. The technique on show — boil, bone, stuff with a forcemeat bound with cream and yolks, poach in stock, then mask and glaze — is standard classical practice, and the same sequence survives in modern galantines. Brains, brawn and the whole head were normal eating in Britain well into the twentieth century; their decline was already advanced before the 1990s, and was further hastened by the BSE controls that followed the epidemic in British cattle.