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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Veal--Calf's Head, Boiled
Take a calf's head, cut it in two, and take out the brains; wash the head in several waters, and let it soak in warm water for a quarter of an hour. Place it in a saucepan of cold water, and when the water comes to the boil skim carefully. Half a head, without the skin, will require boiling from an hour and a half to two hours and a quarter, according to size: with the skin it will require an hour longer. It must be stewed very gently till tender. Boil tender eight or ten sage-leaves, or some parsley, or both; chop them fine, and set them ready on a plate. Wash the brains well in two waters; put them into a basin of cold water with a little salt in it, and let them soak for an hour; then pour away the cold and cover them with hot water; put them into a stewpan with plenty of cold water, and boil very gently for ten or fifteen minutes. Now chop them (not very fine), put them into a saucepan with the sage-leaves, two table-spoonfuls of thin melted butter, and a pinch of salt (some add a little lemon-juice), and stir them well together. As soon as the brains are well warmed, skin the tongue, trim off the roots, and put it into the centre of the dish, the brains round it; or chop the brains with a shallot, a little parsley, and four, hard-boiled eggs, and put them into a quarter of a pint of bechamel or white sauce. A calf's head is usually attended by a pig's check, a knuckle of ham or bacon, or pickled pork, greens, cauliflower, broccoli, or peas, and always by parsley and butter. If desired full-dressed, score it superficially, beat up the yolk of an egg, and rub it over the head with a feather. Powder it with a seasoning of finely-minced or dried and powdered winter savory, lemon-thyme, or sage, parsley, pepper, salt, and bread-crumbs; and brown it with a salamander, or in a tin Dutch oven; when it begins to dry, sprinkle a little melted butter over it with a paste-brush. You may garnish the dish with broiled rashers of bacon. (See also recipes under CALF'S HEAD.)
This dish belongs to a period when a whole calf's head, brains included, was ordinary butcher's stock. The brain preparation that runs through the recipe is the reason it cannot be followed now.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the infectious agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and there is no treatment, and no amount of soaking, boiling or seasoning inactivates the agent.
- Cooking does not helpThe prion responsible is not a bacterium or a virus and is not destroyed by the gentle ten to fifteen minutes of simmering the recipe specifies, nor by any domestic cooking. This is a hazard that heat does not solve, which is why it is different in kind from the usual risks of old meat cookery.
- It is not simply a matter of sourcingBrain, spinal cord and certain other tissues from cattle over specified ages are classed as specified risk material and removed at slaughter in the UK, the EU and many other jurisdictions; for the skull and brain the threshold is twelve months of age, so a very young calf falls outside that particular rule. In practice, heads sold with the brains still in are not something you will find at a butcher's counter.
- Half the recipe is a brain sauceThe chopped brains with sage and melted butter, and the variant bound with bechamel and hard-boiled egg, are the point of the dish rather than a garnish. There is no way to follow this text and leave out the hazardous part; if you want boiled veal head, use a current recipe.
- Terms in the textA salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over food to brown it; a tin Dutch oven was an open-fronted reflector box set before the fire. A pig's cheek is the cured jowl. "Thin melted butter" in nineteenth-century English cookery generally means a loose flour-and-butter sauce rather than simply butter melted in a pan.
Boiled calf's head was a staple of nineteenth-century English cookery of the thrifty-genteel sort: a cheap cut that fed a table, dressed up with brain sauce, tongue in the centre of the dish, and the inevitable parsley and butter. Its best-known descendant is mock turtle soup, which used the gelatinous meat of the head to imitate the texture of real turtle, and the head is also the basis of tete de veau en tortue. The dish faded from English kitchens across the twentieth century as offal fell from favour, and the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s ended the brain element: specified bovine offal controls introduced in Britain from 1989 removed cattle brain and spinal cord above the specified ages from the food chain.