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Calf's Head Soup
Take half a calf's head, properly prepared, and as fresh as it can be got. Wash well, and soak it in cold water for a couple of hours. Take it out, drain it, and put it in a saucepan with three quarts of cold water, and let it simmer gently for three hours, when it may be taken out and set on one side until wanted. Put two leeks, two carrots, two turnips, all peeled and sliced, two onions with four cloves stuck in them, a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, half a dozen peppercorns, and a little salt into the liquor. Let these stew gently for another hour, and keep skimming all the time. Strain the soup, and remove the fat, which must be put into a frying-pan, melted, and two large onions sliced into it. Let these brown, add a little of the liquor, and mix with them, gradually and very smoothly, three table-spoonfuls of rice flour, and a salt-spoonful of the essence of anchovies. Add the rest of the liquor, little by little, and the calf's head cut into pieces about an inch and a half square, and let all boil together for five or six minutes. Serve with toasted sippets. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. per quart. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A Victorian brown soup built on gelatine rather than stock cubes: the head gives both the body and the meat, and the skimmed fat becomes the roux. The main obstacle today is sourcing, not technique.
- "Properly prepared"A Victorian butcher split the head, removed the brains and eyes, and scraped and scalded the skin before selling it. Any calf's or veal head sold now will almost certainly need ordering from a halal, Latin American or Italian butcher, and you should ask for it split and cleaned. Half a head is roughly 4-6 lb.
- If you cannot get a headTwo pounds of veal breast plus a split veal knuckle or two pig's trotters give a comparable gelatinous liquor and cuttable meat, though not the same soft skin, which is the point of the dish for those who like it.
- The soak mattersTwo hours in cold water, changed once or twice if you like, draws out blood and helps give a clear liquor; skimping on it tends to leave the soup cloudier.
- Quantities and yieldThree quarts is about 3.4 litres; keep the head barely covered and top up rather than boiling hard, which clouds the broth. The stated yield of seven or eight works as a first course.
- Rice flourGround rice flour, not modern rice starch or glutinous rice flour. Three tablespoons lightly thickens the two quarts or so of finished soup. Cornflour slurried in cold water works if you are stuck, but gives a glossier finish.
- Essence of anchoviesA thick, salty commercial anchovy extract, sold in bottles well into the twentieth century. Half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed salted anchovy fillets, does the same job: it should read as depth, not as fish.
- Salt-spoonfulThe salt spoon of a Victorian condiment set held about a quarter teaspoon. Season the finished soup at the end, since the reduced head liquor concentrates considerably.
- The final boilFive or six minutes is enough to cook the flour through and warm the meat. Longer and the cubes of skin and cheek begin to collapse into shreds, losing the definition of the inch-and-a-half dice.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread, toasted or fried in butter, handed separately so they do not soften in the tureen.
Calf's head was one of the great utility ingredients of nineteenth-century British cooking: cheap, rich in gelatine, and capable of yielding soup, a boiled dish, a mock turtle and a brawn from a single purchase. This version is essentially mock turtle without the wine and forcemeat balls -- the same logic of using the glutinous skin of the head to imitate the texture of turtle fat, a substitution generally traced to the mid-eighteenth century, when real turtle was a luxury of civic banquets. Cassell's gives the probable cost as 1s. 8d. a quart, a figure aimed at a household keeping accounts. The dish faded in Britain after the Second World War, a decline often attributed to offal falling out of fashion and to the calf's head disappearing from ordinary butchers' windows, though closely related preparations survive in Italian and Mexican cooking.