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, Baked
Calf's Head, Baked
Take half a calf's head. Prepare it as if for boiling, removing the brains and tongue. Let it simmer gently for half an hour, then take it out of the water, drain it, and fold it in a cloth to dry. Prepare a breakfast-cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, mix with them two salt-spoonfuls of salt, half a salt-spoonful of cayenne pepper, two dessert-spoonfuls of finely-shredded sage, and the same of parsley. Brush the head over with beaten egg, and strew the breadcrumbs, etc., over it; let it get dry, then repeat, the second time pouring hot butter over instead of brushing with egg. Fill the hollows of the eyes with crumbs. Bake the head in a good oven, basting it frequently with a cupful of sauce mixed with a dessert-spoonful of vinegar. The tongue and brains must be boiled separately, and cut into pieces, and a little time before the head is sufficiently baked, must be strewed with the crumbs and put into the oven to brown. Serve on a hot dish, with a little gravy round the meat, and oyster sauce in a tureen. Time to bake, two hours. Sufficient, half a head for four persons.
This dish is unmakeable today for one specific reason: it treats the brain as an ingredient. The notes below explain the hazard and how to read the rest of the instructions as a historical document.
- Brains are specified risk materialBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. Since the 1990s these have been controlled as specified risk material in the UK, EU and North America and removed from the human food chain, though exactly which tissues are covered depends on the animal's age. The prion is not destroyed by ordinary cooking temperatures.
- The head itself is part of the problemA split calf's head carries not only the brain but the residual spinal cord and the skull cavity lining. Cattle heads became far harder to find at butchers' counters after the BSE controls. If you want a dish of this kind, look to a current recipe built on pork or lamb head, noting that sheep carry their own restrictions.
- No safe substitution is offered hereLeaving the brains out does not reconstruct the recipe as written, since the head, tongue and brains are cooked and served together as one presentation. Treat this page as a record of Victorian practice, not a working method.
- Reading the old measuresA breakfast-cupful is roughly 8-10 fl oz of crumbs; a salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon; a dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons.
- YieldThe book's own note is half a head for four persons.
Calf's head was one of the great set-pieces of nineteenth-century English cookery, valued less for its meat than for the gelatinous skin around the cheek and the contrast between soft palate, firm tongue and rich brains. Boiled calf's head with brain sauce appears in Mrs Beeton, and the baked version here is the dressier treatment: parboil, crumb twice, and brown it whole so it arrives at table looking deliberate rather than merely boiled. The instruction to fill the eye sockets with crumbs is a reminder that the head was served recognisably as a head, a mode of presentation Victorian diners accepted without comment. The dish also belonged to a thrift economy in which nothing from a slaughtered animal went unused, and it has now all but disappeared from British and American tables; mock turtle soup, its close relative, was built on the same half head.