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 Brawn
Take half a large calf's head with the skin on. Wash it well, take out the brains and the soft bone, and lay it in a pickle made of one pound of salt, a quarter of a pound of bay salt, half a pound of moist sugar, and one ounce of salt-petre, boiled in three quarts of water for twenty minutes, skimmed, and put aside until cold. Let it stand in this for eight days, turning it every day. Take it out, wash it well, and boil it gently until tender. Remove the bones, and put the meat while hot into a brawn-tin, flavouring it with salt, pepper, pounded mace, and a little cayenne. Put a heavy weight on it, and let it stand until firm. Turn it out and garnish with parsley. Time, three or four hours. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
This is a nineteenth-century cured brawn (head cheese) built on materials and practices that are no longer permissible or safe. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a workaround; anyone wanting brawn today should follow a current, tested recipe from a butcher or charcuterie source.
- Specified risk materialBovine brain, skull and spinal tissue are classed as specified risk material because BSE prions concentrate there, and prions are not destroyed by the several hours of gentle boiling this recipe calls for. The controls are age-banded and a young calf's head may fall outside them, but the recipe still cooks the whole skinned half-head, skull included, after removing only the brains and soft bone.
- Where you would even get oneA skin-on calf's head is not a routine retail item in much of the anglophone world, and availability depends on local rules. Anything a butcher supplies as a calf or ox head today will be a legally dressed cut, not necessarily the article the recipe assumes.
- Saltpetre, unmeasuredOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to three quarts of water is an uncontrolled cure. Modern curing works with weighed nitrite at a fixed percentage of meat weight, not nitrate dissolved in an open brine, and it does not rely on the cook guessing how much of it the meat absorbs over eight days.
- Eight days at unstated temperatureThe brine is put aside until cold and the head turned daily, but nothing tells the cook to keep it refrigerated. In an unheated Victorian larder that was survivable in cold months; as written it is an eight-day incubation instruction with no temperature attached.
- Bay saltBay salt is coarse sea salt, obtained by solar evaporation, not anything to do with bay leaves. Moist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar. Both terms are recorded here only so the ingredient list reads correctly, not as an invitation to build the pickle.
- The brawn-tinA brawn-tin is a deep, straight-sided mould into which the hot boned meat is packed and pressed under a weight so the natural gelatine sets it into a sliceable loaf. The same principle survives in modern head cheese and in pressed ox-tongue moulds.
- Timing and yieldThe three or four hours given covers the gentle boiling only, not the eight-day pickle or the pressing, for which the recipe says only 'until firm'. Six or seven portions is a fair estimate for half a head, sliced thin as a cold cut.
Brawn is one of the oldest surviving forms of English cold meat cookery, a way of turning the gelatinous, awkward parts of an animal's head into something firm enough to slice, and it appears in printed English cookery long before Cassell's. A calf's head in particular was prized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the sheer quantity of collagen in the skin and cheek, which sets the loaf without any added gelatine; the same head also gave cooks mock turtle soup. The salt, bay salt, sugar and saltpetre pickle here is the standard domestic cure of the period, used interchangeably for hams, tongues and beef, with the saltpetre included as much for the pink colour it gives the meat as for preservation. The BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s brought this branch of the tradition in Britain largely to an end, though brawn continued to be made, principally from pig heads, and the controls on head and nervous tissue that followed are the reason the recipe now reads as a historical document rather than a working one.