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, COLLARED (to serve hot)
Take a calf's head, properly prepared, blanch and boil it until it is sufficiently tender to remove the bones. When they are taken out, lay the head on the table, and spread on it a forcemeat made of the brain, the tongue, and some of the meat cut from where it is thickest, mixed with a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a teaspoonful of thyme, a tea-spoonful of marjoram, the pounded yolks of three eggs boiled hard, two spoonfuls of brandy, and a little salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Roll the head as tightly as possible, and tie it in a cloth, binding it with tape. Put it into a saucepan with sufficient stock to cover it, and add a carrot, a parsnip, two or three onions, some slices of lemon, a little thyme, four bay-leaves, and salt and pepper. Let it boil gently for three hours, then take it out of the cloth, and pour round it a sauce made of a pint of the liquid in which it was boiled, mixed with a table-spoonful of chopped mushrooms, a table-spoonful of chopped gherkins, and a little lemon-juice. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
This is a boned, stuffed and rolled calf's head, and the stuffing is built on the brain. That single choice puts the dish outside what can be cooked today.
- The forcemeat is the problemBrain is not an optional garnish here; it is the base of the stuffing, alongside the tongue and the thickest head meat. There is no version of this recipe that keeps its identity without central nervous system tissue.
- BSE and specified risk materialBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the infectious agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and cooking does not destroy the agent, since prions are not denatured by ordinary boiling.
- It is also a legal matterSince the BSE controls of the 1990s, bovine skull, brain and spinal cord from animals above a set age (12 months under UK and EU rules) have been classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain. Brain from animals below that age is not caught by the rule, but a whole calf's head with the brain in place is in practice very hard to obtain at retail in those jurisdictions.
- Boning a head does not separate the riskThe instruction to boil the head, lay it out and lift the bones out means handling the skull and its contents directly. The tissue of concern is spread through the working surface, the cloth and the cooking liquid, and the sauce is made from that liquid.
- If you want the dish, not the dangerCollared and rolled meats are still worth making, and a modern recipe for rolled brawn or collared pork or beef will give you the same set piece. Use a current source with its own quantities and times rather than adapting this one.
"Collaring" is one of the oldest English methods for turning an awkward cut into a sliceable centrepiece: the meat is boned, laid flat, spread with forcemeat, rolled tight, bound with tape in a cloth and cooked slowly so it sets into a cylinder. The technique was applied to eels, salmon, pig's head and beef flank as readily as to a calf's head, and the name survives in the brawns and collared meats of Victorian cold tables. Calf's head itself was a staple of nineteenth-century thrift cookery, prized for the gelatine in its skin and for the brain and tongue, which were treated as delicacies rather than offcuts. Its disappearance from British and American kitchens owed something to changing tastes, since the dish had already fallen steeply out of domestic use over the earlier twentieth century, and something to regulation, following the BSE epidemic that began in British cattle in the 1980s and led to the removal of bovine skull and nervous tissue from the food supply.