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, Hashed
Cut the remains of a cold calf's head into nice slices about a quarter of an inch thick and three or four inches long, and set them aside until wanted. Take the remains of the brains and beat them up with a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley, a salt-spoonful of finely-shredded lemon-rind, and a little salt and pepper. Make this into cakes, and fry them in hot fat till they are nicely browned. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a saucepan; melt it, then mix with it very smoothly a table-spoonful of flour, half a pint of well-flavoured stock, a little pepper and salt, and cayenne, and the liquor from a score of oysters, or, what will be very good, though not as good, a table-spoonful of the liquor from a tin of oysters; let this boil up, add the pieces of head, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a score of oysters, fresh or tinned. Let all simmer until quite hot, but the preparation must not boil again. Serve the meat in the middle. Pour the gravy over, and arrange, alternately, fried bacon and the brain cakes round it. Time altogether, half an hour. Probable cost, exclusive of the meat, with fresh oysters, 2s. 6d.; with tinned oysters, 1s. 4d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
This is a Victorian second-day dish built around the leftovers of a boiled calf's head, and its defining component is the brain. That single ingredient puts it out of reach of a modern kitchen.
- Why the brains rule this outBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material in cattle over twelve months old and must be removed and destroyed at slaughter, because they can carry the prion that causes BSE, and in humans variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prions are not destroyed by frying, boiling or ordinary domestic cooking, so no adjustment of time or temperature makes the brain cakes safe.
- It is also a legal question, not only a safety oneIn the UK, EU and many other jurisdictions the removal and disposal of cattle brain and spinal tissue at slaughter is mandatory and the head is subject to controls. Calf's head is consequently hard to obtain from a British butcher today, and the brains are not sold at all.
- The rest of the dish is inseparable from itThe brain cakes are not a garnish that can simply be dropped; they carry the parsley, lemon rind and pepper that season the whole plate, and the sliced head meat is the body of it. What remains without them is an oyster and stock sauce, not this recipe. Use a current recipe if you want something along these lines.
- What a "score" and the costings tell youA score is twenty, so the sauce is carrying twenty oysters and their liquor for four or five people. The recipe gives the probable cost, exclusive of the meat, as 2s. 6d. with fresh oysters against 1s. 4d. with tinned.
- Mushroom ketchupNot the tomato condiment. It is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, closer in use to Worcestershire sauce or a mushroom soy, and a common depth-giver in nineteenth-century brown sauces.
Boiled calf's head was a staple of the Victorian middle-class table, admired for economy and for the gelatinous texture of the skin, and a head large enough to feed a household on Sunday inevitably left cold remains for Monday. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton and Eliza Acton before it, devotes a run of entries to those remains: hashed, curried, in a pie, made into mock turtle. The pairing of head meat with oysters and mushroom ketchup follows the older English taste for combining offal with a salty marine or fermented accent, the same logic that puts anchovy in a steak sauce. Brains were valued as a delicacy in their own right and commonly fried in small cakes or crumbed and served with bacon, an arrangement this recipe reproduces around the edge of the dish. The whole class of calf's head cookery faded from British domestic books over the twentieth century, and the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s did nothing to reverse that decline.