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Calf's Head Collops
Cut a cold calf's head into small neat slices about the third of an inch in thickness. Strew over these a large dessert-spoonful of minced parsley and a little salt and cayenne. Make some good thick batter, dip each piece of meat into it, and fry it in boiling butter or oil until nicely browned. Serve the collops very hot, piled high on a dish, and accompanied with lemon-juice and cayenne. Time to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, 6d., without the cold meat. Sufficient, allow two or three collops for each person.
A leftovers dish: it assumes you boiled a calf's head yesterday and have the gelatinous cold meat sitting in the larder. Everything hinges on the meat being properly cold and set before it is sliced.
- CollopsThe word simply means slices of meat, here cut about a third of an inch thick. Cassell's is not asking for anything more than neat, even pieces that will hold together in batter.
- Sourcing the headA whole calf's head is a special order from a butcher today and is rarely sold at retail. Cold cooked veal cheek, breast or tongue gives the same soft, faintly gelatinous texture and slices in the same way.
- It must be cold and firmBoiled head meat is loose and sticky while warm and will fall apart in the pan. Press it under a weighted plate and chill it overnight so the natural gelatine sets it firm enough to slice cleanly.
- Dessert-spoonfulA Victorian dessert-spoon is about two teaspoons, so a large (heaped) one gives somewhere between two and three teaspoons of minced parsley for the whole batch.
- "Good thick batter"The book gives no proportions. A workable frying batter is about 1 cup flour, 1 egg and 2/3 cup water, milk or beer, beaten smooth and rested. It should coat the back of a spoon heavily rather than run off.
- Boiling butter or oilButter at true frying heat scorches. Use clarified butter, or oil at 350-375F, and shallow-fry rather than deep-fry unless you have depth to spare.
- The ten minutesProbably the total for a panful rather than for each piece, though the book does not say. The meat is already cooked, so the collops need only two to three minutes a side to set the batter and brown it; longer and the batter goes leathery.
- Yield and servingTwo or three collops per person, piled up and sent out immediately. Lemon juice and cayenne at the table are the whole seasoning, and the acid is doing real work against the richness.
"Collop" is an old English word for a slice of meat, generally traced to Middle English and preserved in Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday, when households ate up meat before Lent. A calf's head was one of the great economies of the Victorian kitchen: boiled whole, it yielded soup, brawn, and the base for mock turtle, and its abundant gelatine made the cold leftovers set firm enough to slice and fry. Cassell's, published for middle-class households running on a budget and a cook, is full of these second-day dishes, which turned yesterday's boiled joint into something crisp and hot that could be sent to table on its own account. The trade in calves' heads and other offal collapsed in Britain over the twentieth century, which is why a recipe that once assumed the ingredient was already in the house now begins with the problem of finding it.