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 with Mushrooms
Take half a calf's head with the skin on, wash it in two or three waters, and boil it about an hour, or until the bones can be removed with-out very much difficulty. Remove the bones, replace the brain, and put the head into a stewpan with the skin downwards, and just cover it with good brown gravy, season it with salt and cayenne, and let it simmer for half an hour. Rub two dozen button mushrooms with a flannel and a little salt, cut the ends off the stalks, which must be separated from the mushrooms, and then put them into a stewpan with a little hot butter, and boil them in it for five minutes, taking care that they do not stick to the pan. Drain them, and put them into the gravy, which may be thickened with a little ground rice, and stew all together for another hour. Serve with veal forcemeat balls, and a few rashers of fried bacon. Time, two and a half hours. Probable cost, 5s. 6d. Sufficient for six persons.
This dish cannot be reproduced today. The head is prepared with the brain intact and returned to the pot, and that single instruction puts it outside anything a modern kitchen should attempt.
- The brain is the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk material. They can carry the prion agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans: invariably fatal, untreatable, and with an incubation period measured in years.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not proteins in the ordinary sense of being destroyed by heat. The hour of boiling and the further hour of stewing here have no meaningful effect on infectivity; normal cooking temperatures, and even standard autoclaving, leave prions substantially intact.
- A whole head is not a butcher's itemIn the UK, EU and many other jurisdictions, cattle skulls including brain and eyes from animals over a specified age are legally classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed at the abattoir. Animals below that age threshold fall outside the rule, but in practice a half calf's head with the brain still in place is not something you will find at a butcher's counter.
- Age does not make it safeVeal calves fall below the age thresholds used in some regulations, but those thresholds are risk-management tools, not guarantees. The controls exist precisely because there is no reliable test on a live animal, and post-mortem testing of nervous tissue picks up infection only late in incubation.
- The rest of the dish is not a workaroundRemoving the brain and proceeding with the head meat would be a different recipe requiring different handling and timings throughout. If you want stewed veal with mushrooms and forcemeat, use a current recipe written for cuts you can actually buy.
- On the cost lineFive shillings and sixpence for six is worth reading as economic history rather than shopping advice.
Calf's head was one of the great utility dishes of the nineteenth-century English kitchen, cheap enough for a thrifty household and dressed up often enough to appear at good tables, most famously as mock turtle soup, where the gelatinous skin was made to imitate the texture of turtle fat. Cassell's, an encyclopaedic Victorian compendium aimed at middle-class households with a cook, gives instructions for head preparations because so little of an animal was allowed to go to waste, and the brain was often treated as a delicacy, usually poached and served in a sauce or, as here, simply returned to the dish. Calf's head cookery had in any case declined sharply well before the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, after which bovine skull and nervous tissue were removed from the food chain by law, so that the legislation finished off something already marginal rather than ending a living practice.