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
It is better to order a calf's head a day or two before wanted. If only half a one is required, this applies more particularly; and a half is sufficient for a dinner for a small family. The heads are sold by butchers either skinned or unskinned, and if they are sent home unskinned great care must be taken to scrape the hair off as closely as possible. To do this the head must be put into water which is just upon the point of boiling, and remain there for a few minutes after it does so, then taken out and the hair scraped off with a blunt knife, the head divided, and the brains and tongue taken out. The head must be most carefully washed. The first thing to do, on receiving a calf's head, is to remove the brains, throw them into cold water for an hour, drain them, and boil them in salt and water for a quarter of an hour, and put them on one side. Put the head into cold water and wash it well, clearing the cavities inside with the fingers, lay it in fresh cold water, and leave it there to draw out the blood, etc. One of the choice bits of a calf's head lies deep in the socket of the eye. It is always best to cook a calf's head as soon as possible, and while it should be thoroughly cooked, it should not be overdone. It ought to be served in slices; and to secure this it should be bound with a little broad tape. When it is to be served, lay it, cheek upwards, on the dish as it comes from the water, or brush it over with beaten egg, dust bread-crumbs over it, and brown it. The brains and tongue should be sent to table with it, on a separate dish; and the addition of ham or bacon is considered by many persons an improvement. Calf's head is usually garnished with sliced lemon. Probable cost, 5s. to 9s.
This is a set of butchery-and-poaching instructions for a whole or half calf's head, brains included. The brains are the problem, and they are not incidental to the method — the recipe opens with them.
- Why the brains rule this outBovine central nervous system tissue — brain and spinal cord — is the tissue that carries the infectious prion agent of BSE. The resulting human disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is invariably fatal and has no treatment. Prions are not destroyed by the quarter-hour boil described here, nor by any domestic cooking temperature.
- The head itself is regulated, not merely unfashionableSince the BSE controls of the 1990s, bovine skull, brain and eyes have been classed as specified risk material in the UK, EU and elsewhere, and cannot legally enter the food chain from animals above a set age. The "choice bit deep in the socket of the eye" that the book prizes is precisely the sort of tissue those rules exclude.
- The tongue is a separate questionTongue has never been the risk tissue here, and beef and veal tongue are still sold. Anyone wanting that should buy it as tongue from a butcher and follow a current recipe rather than working from a whole-head method.
- Scalding and scrapingThe unskinned head assumes a household used to dressing carcass parts — plunging into water at the point of boiling to loosen the bristle, then scraping with a blunt blade. A head delivered hair-on is not something an ordinary modern retailer supplies, and the instruction is now largely of documentary interest.
- "Bound with a little broad tape"Cotton tape, not adhesive tape. Tying held the head together so it could be carved in neat slices, the same reasoning behind netting a rolled joint today.
- Probable costFive to nine shillings, quoted in pre-decimal money. The head was cheap relative to the amount of food it yielded — gelatine, tongue, cheek meat and brains from one purchase — though the outlay itself was not trivial for a labouring household.
Calf's head was one of the great set pieces of nineteenth-century English cookery, the base of mock turtle soup and of the gelatinous "calf's head collared" dishes that the household cookery books of the period all carried; the head gave a cook gelatine, tongue, cheek meat and brains from a single cheap purchase, and thrift on that scale was the whole argument for it. The instruction to order it a day or two ahead suggests, though the page alone cannot establish it, that butchers dressed heads to order rather than keeping them on the block. Its disappearance from British and American kitchens was already well advanced by the mid-twentieth century as offal fell from favour, and the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s closed the matter: brain and skull tissue from cattle was placed under statutory control, and a dish built around the whole head became not merely unfashionable but largely impossible to make as written, even where head meat from young calves is still eaten legally, as with tête de veau in France. The page survives here as a record of how completely a mainstream household dish can be withdrawn.