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, Hashed
Soak the head in water, boil it, not thoroughly, but until the meat may be cut clean from the bone. Take the meat off the bone on the best side, lay it in a dish, and cover it with crumbs of bread among which are a few herbs cut very small, with some pepper, salt, and nutmeg, and the yolks of two eggs. Set the dish before the fire, and keep turning occasionally that all parts of the meat may become brown. Slice the remainder of the head, peel and slice the tongue also. Put a pint of good gravy, or of the liquor in which the head was boiled, into a pan with an onion, a small bunch of sweet herbs, some salt, cayenne, shallot, a glassful of sherry, and a little oyster liquor. Boil these together for a few minutes; then strain the gravy over the meat, which should have been previously dredged with flour. Fresh or pickled mushrooms, truffles, morels, and two spoonfuls of ketchup should be added. Half the brains beaten up with flour and butter should be added, and the whole simmered together. The other half of the brains are to be beaten up with lemon-peel and parsley finely chopped, some nutmeg, mace, and an egg. These are to be fried in small cakes, also some oysters dipped in yolk of egg; with these and some good forcemeat balls the dish must be garnished. (See also recipes under CALF'S HEAD.)
This is a full Victorian hashed calf's head, and it cannot be reproduced. The brains are not a garnish that can simply be left out of the reading: they are worked into both the thickened sauce and the fried cakes, and they are the reason the dish is off the table.
- Brain and nervous tissueBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. The prion responsible is not destroyed by boiling, frying, or the long simmering this recipe calls for, and variant CJD in humans is untreatable and fatal. No cooking step in this recipe reduces that risk.
- Why the whole head is the problemThe hazard is not confined to the brains bowl. Getting brains out of a head means opening the skull, which spreads nervous tissue across the meat and the equipment, and the recipe offers the liquor the head was boiled in as one option for the base of the sauce.
- Regulatory realityIn the UK, EU and elsewhere, specified risk material from cattle over a set age -- skull, brain, spinal cord -- has been excluded from the food chain since the 1990s. Brains from cattle are heavily restricted, and a butcher selling head meat with the brains in is now the exception rather than the rule.
- The head is undercooked by designThe instruction is to boil "not thoroughly, but until the meat may be cut clean from the bone," after which the meat is browned by radiant heat in front of the fire and finished in a briefly boiled sauce. That is a deliberately partial cook on offal, judged by texture rather than temperature.
- Oysters as garnishThe oysters are dipped in egg yolk and fried, with no time or temperature given, and oyster liquor goes into the gravy. Both practices assume a supply and a set of expectations about shellfish that no longer hold.
- If you want the dishModern head-meat cookery works from cheek, tongue and boned brawn, and any of it should be taken from a current recipe with stated temperatures rather than adapted from this one.
Hashed calf's head belongs to a long English tradition of turning a cheap, gelatinous cut into something ostentatious: the meat is boiled, one side is crumbed and browned, and the rest is sliced back into a rich brown sauce with sherry, ketchup, truffles, morels and oyster liquor. That list of flourishes is the tell -- mushroom ketchup, oyster liquor and forcemeat balls were the standard Georgian and Victorian vocabulary for making a humble base taste expensive, and they had largely faded from English kitchens by the mid-twentieth century. Mock turtle soup, the most famous dish made from a calf's head, depended on exactly this butchery. The brains, here beaten with lemon peel, mace and egg and fried in little cakes, were prized as a delicacy for their texture; BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986 and variant CJD recognised in humans in 1996, and the appetite and the trade did not survive them.