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Calf's Head, Curried
Cut up the remains of a calf's head into pieces about an inch square, and lay them on one side. Put a piece of butter about the size of a large egg into a saucepan; let it melt, then slice into it two large onions, and fry them until lightly browned on both sides; take them out, and stir a dessert-spoonful of curry powder gradually and smoothly into the butter, and afterwards a small cupful of good stock. When the sauce is quite smooth, add the cold calf's head and onions; let the mixture boil ten minutes, and just at the last squeeze in the juice of half a lemon. Put it into the centre of a dish, with a border of rice round it, boiled as for other curries. If necessary, a little more stock may be added, but curries should not be watery. Probable cost, exclusive of the cold meat, 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A leftovers recipe: it assumes you boiled a calf's head earlier in the week and have half of it sitting in the larder. The method is sound, and the only real work is translating the Victorian measures and finding the meat.
- The hinge: fry the curry powderStirring the powder into the hot butter before any liquid goes in is the whole point of the dish. Raw curry powder slackened straight into stock tastes dusty and harsh; thirty to sixty seconds in fat over moderate heat takes the edge off and blooms the spices.
- Sourcing the meatWhole calf's head is a special order from a butcher who handles offal, and most cooks will not want to boil one first. The nearest thing in texture is cooked veal cheek or braised veal breast, with a little cooked tongue for variety; all give the soft, faintly gelatinous bite the recipe expects. Any cold roast veal will work, but it will be leaner and drier.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Generous by modern habit, but it is carrying the spice and forming the body of the sauce, so do not cut it much.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo level teaspoons in Victorian usage — half a tablespoon on the older reckoning of four teaspoons to the tablespoon. Modern commercial curry powders may well be stronger than the milder Anglo-Indian blends of the period, so treat this as a starting point and taste as you go.
- A small cupful of stockRoughly 5 fl oz, a scant two-thirds of a US cup. Veal or chicken stock, and it should be well reduced — the instruction that curries "should not be watery" is the standard the sauce is judged by.
- Ten minutes' boilingThe meat is already cooked, so this is reheating and reducing, not cooking. Keep it at a bare simmer; a hard boil will shred cooked head meat and split the buttery sauce.
- The lemonAdded at the very last moment, as the recipe directs; taking the pan off the heat first is the safer reading, since cooking the juice dulls the sharpness that lifts an otherwise rich, brown-tasting sauce.
- Yield and servingFour, as the original claims, with the rice border — plain long-grain boiled dry and heaped in a ring around the edge of a hot dish. It is a supper dish, not a dinner-party centrepiece.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of the Victorian middle-class kitchen, and Cassell's gives a good many of them: curried rabbit, curried lobster, curried veal, curried eggs. Curry powder — whose ready-blended commercial form was a British contribution, though it drew on much older Indian traditions of spice-blending, and which was sold by grocers from the late eighteenth century onwards — was valued precisely because it could make cold meat into a hot dish that tasted deliberate rather than thrifty. Calf's head belongs to the same economy. A whole head was cheap, fed a household boiled and served with brain sauce, and left a great deal of soft, gelatinous meat behind; second-day recipes for it fill the older cookery books, mock turtle soup being the most famous. The costing here is the giveaway as to the intended reader: sixpence, exclusive of the cold meat, for four people, in a book that expected its user to account for every dish.