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Baked Calf's Head
Boil until tender, then cut into pieces and put into a deep dish with pepper, salt, a few cloves, mace, a little thyme.
A spoonful butter with flour, well mixed through the meat, a layer of bread crumbs on top. Then add a wineglass of wine and fill up the dish with the water the head was boiled in, and bake three-quarters of an hour. Garnish with forcemeat balls and rings of hard-boiled eggs, just before sending to the table.--Miss N.
A second-day dish built on a boiled calf's head, the kind of economical showpiece that assumed a whole head was already in the kitchen. The head itself is the obstacle; everything after it is straightforward.
- Sourcing the headA split calf's head generally has to be ordered ahead, often from a halal, kosher, Latin or Italian butcher. In the United States, bovine skull and brain from cattle 30 months of age and older are prohibited specified risk material, so what you will legally be sold is a young calf's head, sometimes with the brains removed.
- What to use insteadCooks who want the texture rather than the ceremony can build the same dish on 2-3 lb of veal or pork cheeks, or a mix of cheek and tongue. Both give the gelatinous, faintly sticky meat the recipe depends on.
- "Boil until tender"Reckon on 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer for a split head, with an onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns in the pot. Keep the cooking liquid; it is the sauce for the baking dish and it will set to jelly when cold.
- A wineglassIn nineteenth-century American cookbooks a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, though usage varies. A fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira suits this better than table wine.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature; wood- and coal-fired ranges were not thermostatically controlled. As a modern equivalent, bake at 350F for the stated three-quarters of an hour; everything is already cooked, so the time is only for the crumbs to brown and the liquid to reduce.
- Butter with flourThis is beurre manie, equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste and stirred through the hot meat and stock. A tablespoon of each will lightly thicken roughly a pint of liquid.
- Seasoning quantities"A few cloves, mace" means whole cloves, four or five, and a blade or two of mace, or about a quarter teaspoon ground. Both are assertive; the cloves should be fished out before serving if you use them whole.
- Forcemeat ballsNot optional garnish so much as the traditional partner. Bread crumbs, suet or butter, minced veal or the reserved scraps from the head, egg to bind, seasoned with lemon peel and thyme, rolled small and fried or poached in the stock.
- YieldA head yields a surprising amount of meat. Figure six to eight servings, with the strained cooking liquor left over for soup.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, is full of these unsigned-but-attributed entries: "Miss N." is one of many local cooks whose recipes were gathered rather than written by a single author. Calf's head was a fixture of English cookery carried into the American South, valued because it stretched: the boiled head gave meat for a hash or a bake like this one, stock for soup, and the gelatin-rich liquor that made mock turtle soup possible without turtle. Dishes of this kind faded in the twentieth century as butchery moved out of the household and offal stopped arriving whole.