Home › The Principles of Cookery › CALF'S HEAD (a la Poulette)
CALF'S HEAD (a la Poulette)
Take a dozen good-sized mushrooms, cut off the end of the stalks, and rub the tops with a piece of flannel dipped in salt. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a stewpan, let it melt, and put in the mushrooms. Shake them over a hot fire for a few minutes, turn them into a basin, and keep them covered until they are wanted for use. Cut the remains of a cold calf's head into nicely-shaped slices, and lay them on one side. Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into a saucepan, let it melt, mix with it very smoothly a dessert-spoonful of flour. Stir it until it is lightly browned; add to it very gradually, stirring all the time, a large breakfast-cupful of boiling stock, and a little pepper and cayenne. Let this boil up, add the mushrooms, and boil the sauce gently for a quarter of an hour. Put in the meat, and let it simmer till quite hot; draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, let it cool for two minutes, when the beaten yolks of two eggs may be mixed with the contents. Stir the preparation over the fire till it thickens, but on no account allow it to boil, and at the last squeeze in the juice of half a lemon. Serve on a hot dish. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, without the cold meat, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of using up cold boiled calf's head, rebuilt into a fricassee bound with egg yolk. The whole dish turns on the last step.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inOnce the beaten yolks are stirred in, the sauce must be held below a simmer, around 160-170F, until it coats a spoon. A single boil will scramble the yolks and the sauce will go grainy past rescue. Drawing the pan aside for two minutes before adding them, as directed, is there to drop the temperature first.
- Breakfast-cupfulA large breakfast cup is usually reckoned at about half an imperial pint, so roughly 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups, of stock. Veal or light chicken stock suits the dish; use it boiling, as written, which helps the liquid go into the roux smoothly.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, 55 g, each time, a little more for the first quantity, which the recipe calls a large egg. A dessert-spoonful of flour is about 2 teaspoons, which gives a thin sauce that the yolks will finish thickening.
- Sourcing the meatWhole calf's head is a special order from a butcher at best. Cold cooked veal cheek, tongue, or breast gives the same gelatinous, mildly flavoured slices; poached chicken thigh works if you want the sauce more than the original. Whatever you use should already be cooked and cold, then reheated right through in the sauce before the yolks go in.
- Cleaning the mushroomsThe flannel and salt is Victorian shorthand for skinning and wiping field mushrooms, which came in gritty. Wipe cultivated mushrooms with a damp cloth and trim the stalk ends; no salt rub is needed.
- The browned rouxA sauce a la poulette is normally kept pale, so the instruction to brown the flour is unusual for the name. Stop at a light blond colour unless you want a distinctly darker, nuttier sauce than the classic version.
- TimingA quarter of an hour of gentle boiling before the meat goes in is not excessive here; it cooks out the flour and draws mushroom flavour into the sauce. The meat itself needs only long enough to heat through, a few minutes, or it will shred.
- YieldFour to five as the original states, though that assumes a larger Victorian table of dishes. Treat it as a main for three with rice, mashed potato, or plain boiled macaroni to take the sauce.
A la poulette denotes a white sauce finished with egg yolk and lemon juice, a liaison technique that goes back to classical French practice; the name itself means 'young hen', though its application to this sauce is not traced to a documented origin. Calf's head was a staple of nineteenth-century British kitchens: cheap, gelatinous, and the traditional base of mock turtle soup. Cassell's devotes as much attention to the second and third appearance of a joint as to the first, and this entry is squarely a remains recipe, priced at 1s. 3d. precisely because the meat itself is already paid for. The frankness of that accounting, and the assumption that a cook would have half a boiled head sitting in the larder, mark the distance between that kitchen and this one.