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 Cheese
1 teaspoonful of summer savory 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley I calf's head 1 teaspoonful of salt 1 teaspoonful of sweet marjoram 1 teaspoonful of summer 1 tablespoonful of chopped savory parsley 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper Have the butcher saw the top of the head, and take out the brains. Now wash the head well in cold water; cover with clean cold water, and soak one hour; then scald the nasal and throat passages with boiling water; wash again in cold water, and see that the throat is perfectly free from any foreign matter. Simmer it in hot water, enough to cover, for one and a half hours, or until the meat leaves the bones. When done, take it out carefully, remove the bones, chop the meat and add the other ingredients. Have ready a small bag made from cheese cloth, pack the mixture into it, tie the bag tightly and hang away to cool. When cold, turn the bag, wrong side out, off the meat, and it is ready for use.
Serve cold, cut in thin slices.
This is a nineteenth-century brawn, set by the natural gelatin in a calf's skull rather than by added gelatine. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Bovine specified risk materialThe skull, brain and spinal cord of cattle above a set age are classed as specified risk material in the US, UK and EU and may not be sold for food: in the EU and UK the skull and brain of cattle over twelve months, in the US of cattle thirty months and older. A calf falls below those thresholds, so a calf's head is not automatically SRM, but removing and eating brain and nervous tissue is the practice those rules exist to discourage.
- Cooking does not helpThe prion associated with BSE is not a bacterium. It survives ordinary cooking, and simmering for an hour and a half does nothing to it. There is no time or temperature adjustment that makes this dish safe, which is why none is offered here.
- The hanging bagEven setting the prion question aside, the method packs warm cooked meat into cloth and hangs it in open air to cool slowly through the range where Clostridium perfringens and staphylococci multiply. Period kitchens relied on a cold larder that most homes no longer have.
- The scalded passagesScalding the nasal and throat passages and picking them clean is normally a slaughterhouse job rather than a kitchen one; its presence suggests the head arrived barely dressed. Much head cheese made today uses cheek and jowl meat already trimmed.
- The ingredient list is garbledThe original appears to have been set in two narrow columns and has run together in transcription. Read it as: 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon sweet marjoram, 1 teaspoon summer savory, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 1/4 teaspoon pepper. The stray "1 pound of veal" at the end has no role in the method and seems to belong to a neighbouring recipe.
- Summer savorySatureja hortensis, a peppery annual herb common in nineteenth-century American kitchens. It is still sold dried, often shelved with the poultry seasonings.
- If you want head cheeseUse a current recipe worked from pork head or trotters, with measured chilling. Pork carries no BSE risk and pig's heads remain legally saleable.
Head cheese contains no cheese: the name is generally traced to the older sense of a mass pressed into shape, and it is the same dish as English brawn, French fromage de tête and German Sülze. Its logic is thrift and gelatin — the collagen in a skull, ears and cheeks dissolves in long simmering and sets firm on cooling, so no isinglass or packet gelatine is needed. It belongs to a warm-weather repertoire: before domestic refrigeration, a cold sliced meat that could be made in the cool of the morning, hung in a larder and eaten at midday without further cooking was a summer strategy. Calf's head was a workhorse of Victorian and Edwardian cookery, best known now through mock turtle soup, and butchers sold it split and dressed as a matter of course. It disappeared from Anglo-American kitchens over the twentieth century for reasons of taste, and after the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s regulation restricted skull and brain from cattle above set ages.