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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Calf's Head Pie
Half a calf's head with the skin on, boiled till tender, cut in squares, lay thin slices of bacon at the bottom of the pie-dish, lay squares of the head over, distributing fat, lean, and skin as equally as possible, not close together but with spaces for gravy to form jelly, another thick layer of bacon, and repeat squares as before till the dish is full. Half a pint of Bechamel Sauce. Two Sheets of Gelatine.
Tongue in the middle at top. Four hard-boiled eggs cut in halves, mix brains, sage and eggs into forcemeat balls, sprinkle cayenne and nutmeg, fill in the dish with good stock reduced from the liquor the head was boiled in. Cover with rough puff paste, and bake.
Chaudfroid of Chicken (No. 1).
Ingredients.
One cold boiled Chicken.
Half a pint of Béchamel Sauce.
This is a Victorian raised-pie treatment of a whole calf's head, and it cannot be reproduced today because of the brains it calls for. The notes below explain the specific problem and read the rest of the method as a historical document.
- The brains are the reason to stopBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk material because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the agent of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Ordinary cooking temperatures do not destroy prions, so no amount of boiling or baking makes the forcemeat balls in this recipe safe.
- The head itself is regulated tooThe head is regulated too - In the UK, EU and US the skull, brain and associated nervous tissue of cattle above specified ages (over 12 months in the UK/EU, 30 months and over in the US) are removed at slaughter and excluded from the food chain. A calf falls below those thresholds, so calf's head is still sold in some countries, but availability and rules vary and the brain in particular should not be assumed to be permitted where you are.
- Set-dressing that hides the riskSage, cayenne and nutmeg with hard-boiled egg season the brain forcemeat here, brain being bland and soft. The casualness of the treatment is a reminder that the tissue was handled as ordinary offal, not as anything requiring special care.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe from a reliable modern source. We are not offering a corrected version of this one.
- The page runs onThe last two lines belong to the next entry, Chaudfroid of Chicken (No. 1), and are not part of this pie.
- Reading the methodThe technique is worth understanding even unmade: alternating bacon and meat with deliberate gaps so reduced head stock can run between the layers and set to jelly on cooling. 'Rough puff paste' is the quick laminated pastry of the period. The recipe gives no oven heat or time at all - simply 'bake'.
Calf's head was one of the great utility ingredients of the nineteenth-century kitchen: gelatinous, cheap in proportion to its bulk, and capable of being turned into mock turtle soup, brawn, a boiled dish with brain sauce, or a cold pie like this one. Cookery writers from Hannah Glasse onward gave pages to it, and the pie form here belongs to the same family as the cold veal-and-ham and pork pies that relied on a natural stock jelly rather than added gelatine to bind the layers. It is a reminder that an ambitious late-Victorian table valued elaborate construction over expensive raw material - the skill lay in the layering, the tongue set in the centre, and the clear set of the jelly. The dish fell out of general use in Britain through the twentieth century as offal cookery declined.