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CALF'S HEAD, COLLARED (to serve cold)
Take a calf's head, properly prepared, remove the brains, and put it into boiling water for a quarter of an hour to blanch it; wash it thoroughly, put it into cold water, and boil until the bones can be removed. Bone and lay it flat on the table, and sprinkle over it, in alternate layers, six table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, some ground pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, pink ham cut into slices, and the yolks of six eggs boiled hard, sliced, and dotted here and there. Roll the head as tightly as possible, tie it in a cloth, and boil it gently for four hours. Take it out, drain, and put it under a weight, and do not remove the cloth and bandages until it is cold.
A collar is a boned, seasoned, rolled and pressed cold cut — the ancestor of head cheese and of the pressed meat terrines still sold at good butchers. Nothing here is difficult, but almost everything about the shopping and the timing has changed.
- Sourcing the headA whole calf's head is a special order from a halal, kosher-style or old-fashioned butcher, and it will often arrive already split and cleaned ("properly prepared"). The recipe assumes the brains are still in, since it tells you to take them out. Ask for it boned if you would rather skip that stage, though the skin must stay in one sheet for rolling.
- Blanching is not optionalThe quarter-hour in boiling water followed by a cold-water wash draws out blood and scum and firms the skin so it can be handled. Skip it and the finished collar is grey and cloudy rather than clean-set.
- How long the first boil takes"Until the bones can be removed" is likely to mean something in the region of two to three hours at a bare simmer, depending on the size of the head. The bones should slip out with no resistance; the skin should still be intact enough to roll.
- Pink hamThis means cured cooked ham, not fresh pork — a boiled or baked ham cut in thin slices, pink from the cure. It is there for colour in the cut face as much as for flavour.
- The rolling is the hingeRoll as tightly as the skin will bear, then bind it in a scalded cloth with string every inch or so. A slack roll sets with gaps and falls apart under the knife; the gelatine in the skin is what glues the whole thing together, and pressing helps it set close.
- Four hours is not a misprintThe second boil is long because it is cooking the roll through and dissolving the collagen that will set the slices. Keep it at a lazy simmer — a rolling boil bursts the cloth and squeezes the filling out of the ends.
- Pressing and coolingPress between two boards or trays under a good weight. The recipe puts the hot roll straight under pressure and leaves the cloth on until it is cold; modern practice is to get a mass this size into the refrigerator as soon as it stops steaming rather than leaving it out overnight.
- Yield and servingA collar of this size makes a substantial cold dish for a table of several. Serve cut thin with a sharp vinaigrette, mustard, or pickles; it keeps three or four days refrigerated.
Collaring is one of the oldest English methods of dealing with an awkward cut: bone it, season it, roll it into a "collar", boil and press it, and what was fiddly and gelatinous becomes a sliceable cold dish for the sideboard. Eel, brawn, pork and breast of veal were all collared the same way, and the technique belongs to the same family as head cheese and Italian testa in cassetta. Calf's head was cheap, widely available and central to Victorian cookery urtle soup its body — and Cassell's, written for households that bought whole heads without blinking, treats it as ordinary. Its disappearance from British and American kitchens over the twentieth century arguably has less to do with taste than with the retail trade: once butchers stopped breaking whole animals in the shop, the head stopped appearing on the counter, and the recipes went with it.