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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One Onion (Two sticks of Celery)
Two sticks of Celery.
Two tablespoonfuls of Flour.
One gill of Vinegar.
One tablespoonful of Salt.
Half a calf's head; wash and clean well, remove the brains, put it in a stewpan, cover with cold water, and add the carrot, onion, celery, flour, and one gill of vinegar (this is added to make the head keep white), and the salt. Skim well when boiling; let it simmer two hours, when serve with Piquante sauce. Garnish with the brains and tongue cooked separately.
This is a boiled half calf's head garnished with its own brains and tongue, and the brains are the reason it cannot be reproduced. The notes below explain the specific hazards and decode the period language rather than adapting the method.
- Why the brains rule this outBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials because they can carry the infectious prion that causes BSE, linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is invariably fatal and untreatable. Cooking does not inactivate prions; simmering, as here, does nothing to reduce the risk.
- The head itself is regulatedIt is not only the brains. In the EU and UK the skull, eyes and spinal cord of cattle above a set age (and the tonsils at any age) are removed at the abattoir and destroyed as specified risk material. Heads from young calves are not caught by the age limit everywhere, so the legal position varies by jurisdiction and date; where head meat is sold it is generally supplied already cleared and inspected.
- Removing the brains is not a fixThe recipe has the cook lift the brains out of the already-halved head at home, then cook them separately for garnish. Handling nervous tissue in a domestic kitchen spreads it onto the meat, the board and the tools, which is the cross-contamination that commercial handling rules exist to prevent.
- If you want the dishTête de veau is still cooked professionally from cleared, inspected head meat under veterinary controls. Use a current recipe from a reliable modern source and buy the meat prepared; do not work from this text.
- A gillA quarter of a pint, five imperial fluid ounces (the US gill is smaller, four fluid ounces). The recipe states the purpose itself: the vinegar is there to keep the head white, an acidulating agent rather than a flavouring in any real quantity, as with sweetbreads.
- The flour in the waterTwo tablespoons of flour stirred into the cooking liquid makes what French kitchens call a blanc, a cloudy court-bouillon that shields pale offal from air and keeps it from greying. It is a technique worth knowing even though this particular dish is off the table.
- Piquante sauceIn a book of this date that means a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar-reduced shallots, gherkins and herbs. It was a common accompaniment to boiled offal dishes of this kind.
- The stray headingThe title as printed, with the onion and celery hanging off it, is a fragment of the ingredient list. The carrot called for in the method never appears in the list at all.
Calf's head was a staple of the nineteenth-century entrée course precisely because it was cheap, gelatinous and showy: one head yielded meat, tongue, brains and enough natural gelatine for mock turtle soup, the celebrated substitute for real turtle that turned on exactly this cut. Books of the high-class cookery type, aimed at cooks in large private households and at the schools that trained them, gave the whole head elaborate treatment, with instructions on keeping it white, skimming the pot and dressing the brains and tongue as separate garnishes. The dish had already declined sharply in British domestic cookery well before the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, after which cattle skulls, brains and spinal cord were classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain across Britain, the EU and beyond. Recipes like this one now read as a record of a dish that was once ordinary and then, quite abruptly, was not.