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.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › CALF'S HEAD (a la Tortue)
CALF'S HEAD (a la Tortue)
This dish, which is elaborate and apparently difficult, will not be found to be beyond the power of anyone who can please the eye as well as the palate, and, after having flavoured a dish judiciously, can arrange it elegantly. Procure a large calf's head, properly prepared. Scald it with the skin on. Remove the brains, which must be boiled, chopped, and made into cakes, with bread-crumbs, chopped parsley, pepper, salt, and egg. They can then be put on one side and fried in a little hot butter just before they are wanted. Boil the head in the usual way (see CALF'S HEAD, BOILED) till it is sufficiently tender to allow the bones to be taken away without altering the shape of the head. Do not take away the tongue, as it will help to preserve the form. Take a large stewpan, melt three ounces of butter in it, and when it is brown, mix smoothly with it two table-spoonfuls of rice flour. Add just enough of the liquor in which the head was boiled to cover the meat, but before putting the head in, season the sauce with salt, cayenne, nutmeg, four large tomatoes stewed, and two glasses of sherry. Let it boil up, then put in the calf's head, and when this is hot it is ready to serve. The brain cakes may be heated in the sauce, as also may button mushrooms, forcemeat balls, the yolks of eggs boiled hard, sliced truffles, cock's-combs, real or artificial. It is generally found better to boil and bone this dish the day before it is wanted. Time to stew in the gravy, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
CALF'S HEAD (a la Tortue), another way.
The remains of a cold calf's head may be cut into small squares, warmed in a little good gravy, and ornamented in the same way as the last dish. Make the sauce rather thick, put the meat in the middle of the dish, and garnish as prettily as possible with forcemeat balls, the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, and the whites cut into rings, gherkins, olives, and stewed mushrooms. Time to simmer the meat in the gravy, a quarter of an hour.
This is a set-piece of Victorian table display, and it is also a dish built on tissue that is now classed as specified risk material. The notes below explain what makes it unmakeable and gloss the vocabulary for readers working through the book.
- The brains are the fatal problemBovine and calf central nervous tissue can carry the prion agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prions are not destroyed by boiling, frying, or any cooking temperature a kitchen can reach, so the boiled-and-fried brain cakes cannot be made safe by technique.
- The head itself, not just the brainsIn the UK, EU and elsewhere the skull (including brain and eyes) and spinal cord of cattle over twelve months are legally designated specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed at slaughter. Younger calves fall outside that age limit, so a calf's head is not necessarily unlawful to supply, but rules and availability vary by country and a whole scalded head with the skull intact is in practice very hard to obtain.
- Second version is no saferThe "another way" variant uses the cold remains of the same head. It inherits the same problem and should be read as history rather than as a leftovers plan. If you want a rich brown sauce with forcemeat balls, mushrooms and olives, use a current recipe built on a cut that is legal and safe to buy.
- What "a la tortue" means hereTurtle-style: the head is dressed to imitate the celebrated turtle soup and its garnishes, not cooked with any turtle in it. The sherry, cayenne, nutmeg and forcemeat balls are all borrowed from the turtle repertoire.
- Cock's-combs, real or artificialThe combs of cockerels, blanched and skinned, were a standard garnish in grand nineteenth-century service. 'Artificial' combs were imitations shaped to resemble them, though this recipe does not say what from. Neither is dangerous; both have simply vanished from ordinary cooking.
- Rice flour and the rouxRice flour was a common period thickener, used here in place of wheat flour. Two tablespoons to three ounces of butter is a fairly loose, fat-heavy roux.
- Two glasses of sherryA 'glass' in Victorian cookery normally means a wineglassful, conventionally reckoned at around 2 fl oz, so perhaps a quarter of a pint of sherry in total. The book does not define the measure, and 'a glass' appears in other entries without further explanation, so the figure is approximate.
Calf's head à la tortue belongs to the long Victorian effort to imitate turtle, the most prestigious soup and stew of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Real green turtle was expensive and arrived alive by ship, so cooks reached for the gelatinous, faintly bland texture of a boiled calf's head, which softens to something turtle-like and takes on the same battery of flavourings: cayenne, nutmeg, madeira or sherry, forcemeat balls, hard-boiled egg yolks and mushrooms. Mock turtle soup, made the same way, was common enough by the 1860s that Lewis Carroll could put a Mock Turtle into Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and expect every reader to get the joke. The entry treats the dish as a test of assembly rather than of cooking: the head is boned the day before and kept whole around the tongue so it holds its shape, and it insists at the outset that success lies in pleasing the eye. That priority — a whole head brought to table intact and studded with garnishes — is the clearest signal of how far the period's idea of a fine dish sits from ours, quite apart from the food-safety knowledge that has since made the dish impossible.