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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Devizes Pie
Take thin slices from a calf's head when cold, and some of the brains, pieces of cold lamb, pickled tongue, a few slices of bacon, and some hard-boiled eggs cut neatly into rings; with these fill a pie-dish. Season with pepper, salt, cayenne, and spice; arrange the meat in layers; see that all is well-seasoned, and fill up the dish with a rich gravy. Bake in a slow oven, with a cover of flour and water paste, and remove when cold. The pie must then be turned out on a dish. Garnish with parsley and pickled eggs sliced. Time to bake, one hour.
This is a cold raised-style meat pie built from the leftovers of a boiled calf's head, and the calf's head is the problem. The notes below explain what the instructions assume and why the dish cannot be reproduced today.
- Brain and head tissueBovine central nervous system material is tightly controlled because of BSE: in the UK and EU the skull, brain, eyes and spinal cord of cattle are classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food chain above set age limits (12 months for skull and brain), and the US applies equivalent controls to cattle of 30 months and over. Brains from very young calves fall outside some of those age limits, but the hazard is the reason not to attempt the dish: the prion that causes BSE is not destroyed by the hour in a slow oven this recipe calls for, nor by any domestic cooking.
- Calf's head generallyThe whole head, not just the brains, was the base of this dish. Split calves' heads are now rarely seen in ordinary butchery — a combination of BSE-era controls on bovine head material and the collapse of demand — so the defining ingredient is hard to obtain.
- The cold-set structureThe pie is not a hot-crust pie. The flour-and-water paste answers to what was known as a huff paste — a sacrificial lid that seals the dish during baking and is discarded, leaving a terrine of meats that is turned out cold. For the slices to hold together when turned out, the 'rich gravy' would have to set to a jelly.
- A slow ovenAround 300F. The single hour given is short because everything in the dish is already cooked; the oven is only melding and setting it.
- SpiceIn a nineteenth-century savoury pie "spice" generally means mace, nutmeg and cloves, sometimes as a pre-mixed pudding or forcemeat blend, rather than anything sweet.
- If you want the effectA cold layered meat pie set in jelly is still a live tradition, and a current recipe for a raised pork or veal-and-ham pie will give the same result without the risk. Do not attempt a substitution within these instructions.
Devizes is a market town in Wiltshire, and the pie carries its name in Victorian cookery books as a way of using up the cold remains of a boiled calf's head — a cheap and once-common joint that yielded gelatinous meat, tongue and brains, none of which kept well and all of which suited a cold, jellied pie. Such assemblages were routine: a large joint could be eaten hot and the remainder reworked into something that would sit in a cold larder and be sliced for several days. The huff-paste lid is an older technique still, dating from a time when the crust was a baking vessel rather than food. Calf's head dishes fell away in Britain across the twentieth century for reasons of taste long before the BSE controls of the 1980s and 1990s further restricted them.