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, Roasted
Wash a calf's head, remove the brains and the tongue, and simmer it gently for three-quarters of an hour. Take it out of the saucepan, and fill it with good veal forcemeat. Sew it up, or fasten it securely with skewers, bind it with tape, and put it down to roast. Baste it constantly, serve good gravy with it, and, before sending it to table, squeeze the juice of a lemon over it. Boil the tongue and brains, and serve them on a separate dish, with a few rashers of bacon round them. Time to roast, two hours. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
This is a dish that has been legislated out of existence in most of the world, and the reason is specific rather than squeamish.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they can carry the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which in humans presents as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It is invariably fatal, there is no treatment, and no domestic cooking temperature or time destroys a prion.
- The skull itself carries the restrictionThe controls extend beyond the scooped-out brain -- in the UK and EU the skull, including brain and eyes, and the spinal cord of cattle over twelve months of age are classed as specified risk material. A calf falls under that age limit, so calves' heads and brains are still sold in some markets, France among them; in Britain and elsewhere they are far harder to come by.
- Removing the brains does not clear the dishThe recipe has you take out the brains and then cook the head, and handling nervous tissue at that stage risks spreading it onto the meat and the equipment. Cross-contamination is what the abattoir-level controls exist to prevent.
- Serving the brains separately makes it worse, not betterThe tongue and brains are boiled and sent to table on their own dish with bacon. That plates the highest-risk tissue in the recipe as its own course.
- Do not substitute your way around itThere is no adjustment to timing, temperature or butchery that makes this safe. If you want a stuffed, roasted veal dish, use a current recipe for a boned shoulder or breast and leave the head out of it.
- Reading the original"Good veal forcemeat" is a bound stuffing of minced veal, suet, breadcrumbs, herbs and egg; "bind it with tape" means cotton kitchen tape, the Victorian equivalent of butcher's twine. Both terms are worth knowing for the rest of this book, where they attach to dishes that can still be cooked.
Calf's head was one of the great set pieces of nineteenth-century English cookery, prized less for flavour than for gelatinous texture and sheer economy: a head fed eight or nine people, as Cassell's notes. It appears in mock turtle soup, in the boiled-and-brain-sauce version served with bacon, and here in its most ambitious form, the brains and tongue removed, the head simmered, stuffed, sewn and roasted whole as a centrepiece. The dish also carried a political charge in Britain, where Calves' Head Clubs were said to have met on the anniversary of Charles I's execution to eat one in deliberate mockery of the beheaded king. Head dishes were already receding from English domestic cookery when the British BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s led to bans on specified risk materials, including bovine brain, spinal cord and skull, and in Britain the whole family of head dishes went with them, though tête de veau survives in France.