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 Pudding
Skin the head, take out the brains. Thoroughly wash, then soak the head one night to extract the blood. Put on in cold water and boil five or six hours, or until the bones are ready to drop out. Pick it very fine, taking all the bones out; then add the liquor in which it was boiled, one tablespoonful butter, four eggs well beaten; one small piece of lemon or pickle; one onion, if liked; pepper and salt Lay the brains all over the top and bake. Bread crumbs are an improvement. The liquor seasoned makes excellent soup.--Miss F.E.
A whole-head dish written for a cook who bought her veal from a butcher who broke down the animal in front of her. The method still works, but the shopping and the proportions need translating.
- The hinge: bind, don't drownThe four beaten eggs are the whole structure of the pudding, so add only enough of the cooking liquor to moisten the picked meat -- about a cup to a cup and a half for a head's worth. "Add the liquor" reads as though it means all of it; it does not, and the rest is meant for the soup mentioned at the end.
- Sourcing a calf's headOrder it split from a halal, kosher or whole-animal butcher; supermarkets do not carry it. If you cannot get one, two to three pounds of veal shank and a veal tongue, simmered together until the meat shreds, give the same gelatinous, finely picked texture.
- The brains are a regulatory questionBovine skull and brain from animals over twelve months are classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and cannot be sold, and US rules restrict the same tissues from cattle over thirty months. Brains from a young milk-fed calf may be legal where you are; if they are not offered, leave them out and finish with the bread crumbs instead.
- Overnight soakSoak the head in cold water in the refrigerator, not on the counter, changing the water once or twice. The point is to draw out blood so the finished pudding is pale rather than grey.
- Five or six hours is longA split head in a large pot at a bare simmer is usually ready well short of that, in the region of three to four hours. The recipe's own test is the right one: the bones should slip free.
- "One small piece of lemon or pickle"A strip of lemon peel or a chopped gherkin, finely minced into the meat. Both are there to cut the richness; a tablespoon of the pickle's vinegar does the same work.
- OvenThe recipe gives no heat at all, only 'bake.' Use a buttered dish at 350F until set and lightly browned, roughly 40 to 50 minutes. It is a savoury custard and will weep if pushed much past firm.
- YieldA calf's head should give enough picked meat for a large baking dish, serving eight or so, with a good quantity of seasoned broth left over for the soup.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like this one and generally dated to the late 1870s, belongs to a moment when a household still reckoned with the whole animal and considered it a failure of management to waste any of it. A calf's head was cheap, gelatinous and endlessly convertible: boiled for the classic mock turtle soup, pressed into a brawn or cheese, or -- as here -- picked, bound with egg and baked into a pudding, with the broth carried over to a second meal. The instruction to lay the brains over the top and dust with crumbs is a finishing gesture familiar from other nineteenth-century baked puddings, sweet or savoury. Dishes of this kind gradually vanished from American cookbooks, and changes in retail butchery are often cited among the reasons: by the mid-twentieth century the head no longer arrived at the kitchen door, and the recipes that depended on it went with it.