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 Pie
An excellent pie may be made of calf's head. Take one properly prepared, and boil it until the bones can be taken out. Line the edge of a large pie-dish with a good, light crust, put in the pieces of meat, the tongue at the top, season it with salt, pepper, and a little nutmeg, pour over it a cupful of the liquor in which the head was boiled, cover it with a thick crust, and bake in a good oven until nicely browned. While it is baking put the bones of the head into a saucepan, with a quart of the liquor, a tea-spoonful of powdered mace, an onion chopped small, and half a salt-spoonful of cayenne pepper. Let it simmer gently until it is reduced to half, then strain it, and add two table-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup and a glass of port. Mix the brains with three or four sage-leaves, chopped small, a little nutmeg grated, and an egg. Make them up into little cakes, and fry them in hot frying fat until they are nicely browned. Put them in the oven to keep warm, with a sheet of blotting paper under them to drain off the fat. Have ready also four or five hard-boiled eggs. When the pie is sufficiently cooked, take off the crust, and lay the brain cakes and the eggs, cut into rings, on the top; pour the boiling gravy over all, and fasten the crust on again with the white of an egg before sending the dish to table. Time to bake, an hour and a half or more. Sufficient for eight or nine persons. Probable cost, from 6s. to 11s.
This is a Victorian whole-head dish, and the brain cakes that crown it put it outside what can be cooked today. The notes below explain the hazard and gloss the older terms rather than adapting the method.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and there is no treatment, and cooking does not destroy the prion responsible.
- The head itself, not just the brainA calf's head boiled whole carries skull tissue along with the cheek meat and tongue. Specified-risk-material rules in the UK, EU and US restrict the sale of bovine skull, brain and spinal cord, though the age thresholds vary and young calves fall outside some of them; in practice a head 'properly prepared' in this sense is hard to obtain.
- The bone stockThe second-stage gravy is made by simmering the skull bones in the cooking liquor for a long reduction. Any nervous tissue clinging to the bones goes into that liquor and is then poured over the finished pie, so the risk is not confined to the fried cakes.
- If you want the dishHead-meat pies from lamb or pork shoulder, or a modern brawn recipe from a current source, cover the same ground. Follow a present-day recipe rather than adjusting this one.
- Terms in the textA salt-spoonful is roughly a quarter teaspoon; mushroom ketchup is the thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor sold before tomato ketchup displaced the name; 'a good oven' is an unquantified direction judged by eye, and no temperature is given in the text. 'Sheet of blotting paper' is simply absorbent paper for draining fat.
- CostThe 6s. to 11s. estimate reflects a period when a calf's head was among the cheaper things on the butcher's slab.
Calf's head was a staple of nineteenth-century English cookery precisely because it was thrifty: the head yielded gelatinous cheek meat, the tongue, the brains and enough bone for a strong gravy, and it underpinned mock turtle soup, brawn and boiled head with parsley sauce as well as pies like this one. Cassell's dictionaries of cookery, compiled for middle-class households in the later nineteenth century and reprinted for decades after, treat the head as an ordinary purchase, and the phrase "properly prepared" assumes the reader's butcher will have scalded and cleaned it. The construction here — bake the pie, lift the lid, arrange the fried brain cakes and rings of hard-boiled egg over the meat, flood it with hot reduced gravy and seal the crust back down with egg white — is a Victorian dish-pie flourish, meant to be opened at the table with the gravy still steaming. The dish appears to have faded from British cooking before BSE, as offal fell out of fashion and heads stopped appearing on the butcher's slab; the regulations that followed the 1980s and 1990s epidemic ended it for good.