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, Plain
Take a nice calf's head and bone it, that is to say, take off the bones of the lower jaw and of the nose, which cut off as close to the eyes as possible. Then put this into a large vessel with warm water to wash and disgorge the blood, or otherwise the head will look reddish. Then blanch thoroughly, and let it cool. Now make a white stock in the following manner. Melt over the fire four ounces of finely-chopped beef suet. When clear add four ounces of finely-chopped beef suet. When clear add four ounces of flour, a gallon of water, two onions sliced, three cloves, a clove of garlic, two bunches of herbs, two table-spoonfuls of vinegar, and plenty of pepper and salt. Stir the preparation over the fire. When boiling put in the calf's head and tongue, lay a round of paper over the pan, and simmer for two hours and a half. When done, drain them. Take out the tongue, flay it, and then replace it in the head. A calf's head must be served up quite hot, with the sauce called au pauvre homme (poor man's sauce), namely, minced shallots and parsley, vinegar, salt and pepper, and the brains well minced. (See also recipes under CALF'S HEAD.)
This is a whole boned calf's head simmered in a flour-thickened white stock and finished with a sauce built on the animal's minced brains. The brains are the problem, and they are not optional in the recipe as written.
- The brains are the hinge, and they are the hazardThe sauce au pauvre homme here is finished with minced calf brain; the recipe does not say whether the brains are cooked first, so they may go in raw or barely warmed. Bovine central nervous system tissue is the tissue in which BSE infectivity concentrates, and the prion agent is not destroyed by two and a half hours of simmering, by vinegar, or by any domestic cooking. Skull and brain are classified specified risk material in cattle over twelve months, and no domestic method renders infective brain tissue safe.
- Skull and eye tissue tooCutting the nose off "as close to the eyes as possible" implies the skull, and with it the eyes and trigeminal ganglia, goes into the pot. Along with brain and spinal cord these are the tissues in which infectivity concentrates, which is why the whole head of a bovine over twelve months is excluded from the food chain in the UK, the EU and elsewhere. A calf falls below that age threshold, so the legal position on a calf's head is not the same as for an adult beast.
- Why you cannot simply buy the partsBovine brain and unsplit heads from cattle above the specified-risk-material age threshold cannot lawfully be sold in the UK and the EU, and heads that do reach specialist counters have had the specified risk material removed at the abattoir. Rules on brain from animals under twelve months vary by country; check the position where you are rather than assuming either way.
- The rest of the method is period-standardThe rest of the method is period-standard. The white stock is a plain blanc: fat and flour cooked out, slackened with water, sharpened with vinegar to keep the meat pale. The repeated "four ounces of finely-chopped beef suet" is plainly a duplication of one line rather than two separate additions.
- If you want the dishHead meat and tongue braised in a blanc survive in modern cooking, and a vinaigrette of shallot, parsley and vinegar needs no offal at all. Work from a current recipe written to present-day rules on bovine offal rather than adapting this one.
Boiled calf's head was a fixture of nineteenth-century English cookery, cheap in ingredients and lavish in labour. The finishing sauce, au pauvre homme, is a French kitchen term for the simplest possible dressing of shallot, parsley, vinegar and seasoning, the sort of thing a household with no butter to spare could produce; this recipe adds the minced brains to it. Mock turtle soup, the great Victorian imitation of green turtle, was built on the same boiled head, which is why so many books of the period assume a cook will have one to hand. All of this largely ended in the late twentieth century with the BSE epidemic in British cattle and the resulting ban on specified risk material, which took the calf's head out of the ordinary butcher's window.