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 Ragout
Boil a calf's head, and while the flesh is still firm, take it up, cut it into nice slices, about half an inch thick, and as large as possible. Dust these on both sides with flour, salt, and grated nutmeg. Have a saucepan ready, melt two ounces of butter in it, and fry the pieces of meat, and as each piece is lightly browned, put it into a stewpan. When all the pieces are fried, mix a table-spoonful of flour very smoothly with the butter left in the pan, and add gradually to this a breakfast-cupful of the liquid in which the head was first boiled, and a wine-glassful of sherry or Madeira. Season the liquor with the juice of half a lemon, and a little cayenne. When this sauce is quite smooth, pour it over the meat, and let all simmer together for about ten minutes. Arrange the meat nicely on a hot dish, and pour the sauce round it. Garnish either with brain cakes or toasted sippets. Time, to boil calf's head, one hour and a half. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
This is a nineteenth-century butcher's-economy dish built on a whole calf's head, and the head is precisely the part of a bovine carcass that modern food law removes from the supply chain. The notes below explain why the recipe cannot be followed today rather than how to adapt it.
- The head itself is the problemCattle skull, brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU, because they are the tissues that carry the BSE agent. The rules are keyed to age: in the UK and EU these tissues are SRM in animals over twelve months old, and in the United States over thirty months, so heads from older cattle are excluded from the food chain altogether, while calf heads from young animals remain legal in some places. The controls exist because ordinary cooking does not destroy prions.
- Brain cakesThe suggested garnish is fried calf's brain. This is the highest-risk tissue of all for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal and untreatable condition. No temperature or cooking time makes it safe, so there is no adjusted version of this instruction to give.
- The boiling liquorThe sauce is built on the water the head was boiled in, which concentrates whatever came out of the skull. It is not a separable part of the dish that could be made from clean stock and still be this recipe.
- If you want the dishA braise of gelatinous veal in a floured sherry-and-lemon sauce is a perfectly good thing to eat, and a current recipe using shin, cheek or breast will get you there. Use one of those rather than reworking this text.
- Reading the originalFor historical interest: a breakfast-cupful is roughly 10 fl oz (300 ml), a wine-glassful about 2 fl oz (60 ml), and sippets are small triangles or fingers of fried or toasted bread. The stated yield of eight or nine reflects how much meat a whole head carried.
Calf's head was one of the great economy showpieces of the Victorian kitchen: cheap, enormously gelatinous, and capable of stretching across a table. Boiled whole it fed a family; its rendered richness underpinned mock turtle soup, the imitation of real turtle soup that household manuals of the period took for granted. The head also carried political freight in Britain, where Calves' Head Clubs were said to have dined on it each January in mocking commemoration of the execution of Charles I. Ragouts of this kind, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux and sharpened with sherry, lemon and cayenne, show the domesticated French technique that ran through English cookery books from the 1700s onward. The dish had already been in decline in ordinary British cooking for some time before the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, after which bovine skull and brain from older cattle were removed from the human food chain in Britain and across Europe.