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Calf's Head, Fried
Cut the remains of a cold calf's head into pieces about an inch and a half wide. Lay them for three hours in a pickle made of two table-spoonfuls of lemon-juice, the same of white wine, salt, pepper, and powdered cinnamon. Take them out, drain them, and dip each piece into a batter. Fry them in boiling fat till they are a bright brown, and pile them in a pyramid on a hot dish. Time, ten minutes to fry. Probable cost, 6d. or 8d., without the wine.
This is a second-day dish, written for a kitchen that had already boiled a whole calf's head for another meal. Everything hinges on the meat being fully cooked and cold before it goes into the marinade.
- What "the remains of a cold calf's head" meansThe head has already been soaked and simmered until tender (often boned), then left to go cold — the gelatin sets it firm enough to cut into neat pieces. Starting from a raw head means several hours of preliminary boiling that this recipe assumes has been done.
- Sourcing, and substitutesA calf's head must be ordered from a butcher who breaks down whole carcasses, and is usually sold split and sometimes boned. Cooked veal cheek, breast or tongue behaves much the same way in the pan: gelatinous, mild, and firm once chilled.
- The "pickle" is a marinadeTwo tablespoons each of lemon juice and white wine, with salt, pepper and cinnamon, is a dry-ish seasoning bath rather than a preserving pickle. Three hours is fine, but do it in the refrigerator, not at room temperature as the original assumed.
- Cinnamon is not a slipWarm spice with veal appears regularly in nineteenth-century cookery, inherited from earlier English cookery where cinnamon, mace and nutmeg often went into savoury meat dishes. Use it sparingly — a large pinch for a head's worth of meat.
- The batter is left to youThe recipe just says "a batter"; a plain frying batter is what is meant — roughly 1 cup flour to 1 cup liquid (milk, water or beer) with an egg and a little salt, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Dry the meat well after draining or the batter slides off.
- "Boiling fat" means deep fat at 350–375FBelow that the batter absorbs grease; above it, the coating browns before the meat inside has heated through. Fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Ten minutes is for large piecesInch-and-a-half pieces of already-cooked meat only need long enough to set and brown the batter and heat the centre — usually four to six minutes. Ten minutes suits thicker, colder pieces; judge by the colour of the crust.
- Serving and yieldServing -- The pyramid is Victorian presentation; a hot dish with lemon wedges, fried parsley and a sharp sauce (tomato, piquante or plain tartare) does the same work.
Calf's head was one of the great utility meats of the Victorian kitchen: cheap, richly gelatinous, and the basis of mock turtle soup, which imitated the costly green turtle soup of civic banquets by exploiting the head's melting, turtle-like texture. Boiling a head whole was a lengthy job of some hours, so cookery dictionaries like Cassell's routinely followed the main preparation with a string of recipes for the cold remains — hashed, à la vinaigrette, in croquettes, or battered and fried as here. The gentle marinade of lemon and wine plus a warm spice is a survival of older English practice, and the note of "probable cost, 6d. or 8d., without the wine" shows the book's readership plainly: households where the price of the wine was worth listing separately because it might well be left out. Boiled and fried calf's head remained familiar across France (tête de veau) and Italy long after it dropped out of British domestic cooking in the twentieth century, and it survives on restaurant menus that make a point of whole-animal cooking.