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.
Calf's Head
1 calf's head 1 onion 1 bay leaf 6 whole cloves 1 tablespoon salt 1 root of celery Split the head through the center, remove brains and lay them in ice-cold salted water. Wash the head thoroughly in many changes of cold water. To remove the skin, begin from under the head, keeping the knife close to the bone, remove as one piece. Singe the skin and place in cold water for one hour, after which scrape it with a knife; singe again and place in cold water. Scald the cleaned head with boiling water, then place it, with skin on top, in a soup kettle; pour over it 4 quarts of cold water, bring to boiling point, and skim. Reduce heat, cover and let simmer for two hours; add seasonings and let simmer for one hour longer.
Wash the brains in cold water; put in saucepan of boiling water and simmer for twenty minutes, drain, plunge into cold water and cut into pieces. When head is cooked, cut the skin into strips four inches long by two inches wide. Skin and trim the tongue, slice and arrange on a platter with the strips of skin and brains. Serve with sauce a la Tortue and garnish with new beets sliced, watercress, or parsley.
The broth in which the head is cooked should be saved for mock turtle soup.
This is a classic preparation of a whole calf's head, and it cannot be reproduced today. The problem is not technique but the tissue itself.
- Brains and central nervous tissueThe recipe's central step is removing, poaching and serving the brains. Bovine 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 domestic cooking step inactivates the agent.
- The head itself is not a workaroundSkull contents, eyes and the trigeminal ganglia within the head are classed as specified risk material in the UK, EU and elsewhere once cattle pass the relevant age threshold, and split heads are restricted in commercial sale. Sourcing the item this recipe begins with may not be possible where those rules apply.
- The broth carries the same problemThe head is simmered whole apart from the brains, which are poached separately, and the instruction to save the cooking liquor for mock turtle soup means any residual nervous tissue is not confined to the platter. Boiling and long simmering do not inactivate the agent.
- Age of animal is not a safeguardOlder cookbooks assume a young calf is inherently wholesome. Age reduces but does not eliminate risk.
- If you want the dish that followsMock turtle soup and sauce a la Tortue are both still worth cooking. Use a current recipe built on veal shank, oxtail or a gelatinous cut, and do not attempt to substitute back toward the head.
- Historical reading onlyThe method is worth reading for what it shows about handling and singeing skin, poaching tongue, and the economy of a whole-head preparation. Read it; do not source the ingredient.
Calf's head was a staple of the nineteenth-century kitchen on both sides of the Atlantic, prized because it yielded three distinct things at once: gelatinous skin cut into strips, a tender tongue, and brains treated as a delicacy, with the cooking liquor going on to become mock turtle soup. Real green turtle was a luxury import for grand dinners, and mock turtle was the thrifty domestic imitation, its rich, faintly gluey broth and cubes of pale meat standing in for turtle flesh; the accompanying sauce a la Tortue, thick with herbs, wine and often gherkins, completed the illusion. The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was distributed by the Washburn Crosby milling company in the early twentieth century as promotional literature, and its inclusion of so laborious a preparation reflects a period when a cook was expected to break down a whole head, singe and scrape skin, and waste nothing. Head cookery of this kind faded through the twentieth century as butchery moved out of the home, and BSE regulations from the 1990s onward restricted it sharply.