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.
Home › Cookery › Calf's Head Soup (Take the head split it open)
Calf's Head Soup (Take the head split it open)
Take the head, split it open and take out the brains; then put the head, brains, and haslet in salt water--let them soak one hour. Put on to boil at eight o'clock; after boiling four hours, take it up and chop up the head and haslet, removing all the bones; return to the soup, with a small pod of pepper. Thicken it with one pint browned flour with one tablespoonful butter rubbed it. Have-- 1 tablespoonful mace. 1 tablespoonful allspice. 1/2 doz. cloves. Beat all together and put in the tureen with, 1 teacup of tomato catsup. 1 teacup of cooking wine.
Pour the soup on them. Have the brains fried, and two hard boiled eggs sliced and dropped in the soup.--Mrs. T. C.
Brown Calf's Head Soup.
Scald and clean the head, and put it to boil in two gallons water, with A shank of veal. 2 carrots. 3 onions. A small piece of bacon. A bunch of sweet herbs.
When they have boiled half an hour, take out the head and shank, and cut all the meat off the bone in pieces two inches square. Let the soup boil half an hour longer, then strain it and put in the meat, and season with salt, black and cayenne pepper (and a few cloves, if you like them). Thicken with butter and brown flour.
Let it now boil nearly an hour longer, and just before serving it, stir in one tablespoonful sugar browned in a frying-pan, and half a pint wine. A good substitute for turtle soup.--Mrs. Col. A. F.
Calf's Head Soup.
Have a head nicely cleaned, the brains taken out and the head put to soak. Put it on with. 1 gallon water. 1 piece of fat ham. Thyme, parsley, pepper and salt. Boil together until the flesh is tender: take out and chop-strain the water-two tablespoonfuls brown flour, four ounces butter-returning the "dismembered" fragments; let it boil till reduced to two quarts. Season with one-half pint wine, one gill catsup, nutmeg, mace, allspice. Cut up the liver, and fry; beat the brains up with an egg, pepper and salt; fry in cakes and lay in the soup when served up, and hard boiled eggs sliced up and put in--Miss B. L.
Ox-tail Soup.
Wash and soak three tails; pour on them one gallon cold water; let them be brought gradually to boil, throw in one and a half ounce salt, and clear off the scum carefully as soon as it forms on the surface. When it ceases to rise, add: 4 moderate sized carrots. 2 or 3 onions. 1 large bunch savory herbs. 1 head celery. 2 turnips. 6 or 8 cloves, and 1/2 teaspoonful peppercorns. Stew these gently from three hours to three and a half hours. If the tails be very large, lift them out, strain the liquor and strain off all the fat. Cut the meat from the tails and put it in two quarts or more of the stock. Stir in, when this begins to boil, a thickening of arrow-root or of rice flour, mixed with as much cayenne and salt as may be required to flavor the soup, and serve very hot.--Mrs. P.
Four contributed soups, three of them variations on the same calf's head and one on oxtail. The head versions assume a whole scalded head, a household that started the pot mid-morning for a mid-afternoon dinner, and a cook who knew that browned flour is a separate pantry item.
- Sourcing the headA whole calf's head, scalded and split, is a special-order item from a halal, Latin American or old-style butcher, and in many places it is not sold at all. Bovine skull and brain are classed as specified risk material and are regulated above certain ages (over 12 months in the EU and UK, over 30 months in the US), so calf brain may or may not be legally saleable where you are; check before planning the dish around it.
- HasletThe haslet (or pluck) is the heart, liver and lights of the animal. Lungs cannot be sold for food in the United States, so a modern version reduces to heart and liver.
- Timing by the clock"Put on to boil at eight o'clock" reflects a dinner served in the early afternoon. Mrs. Brown's four hours of boiling is what a head genuinely needs; Mrs. Col. A. F.'s half hour only loosens the meat from the bone before the stock is finished separately.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-brown, kept in a jar, and used for both colour and thickening. It has perhaps half the thickening power of raw flour. One pint to Mrs. Brown's potful gives a very heavy soup; a cup is closer to modern taste.
- Teacup and gillA teacup in period American receipts is usually reckoned at roughly three-quarters of a cup, a gill at half a cup. "Cooking wine" here means whatever wine the house kept for the kitchen -- in a Virginia household commonly sherry or Madeira -- not the salted supermarket product sold under that name today.
- Browned sugarMrs. Col. A. F.'s tablespoonful of sugar browned in a frying pan is caramel colouring, the same trick used in gravy browning. Take it dark but stop short of bitter, and add it off the heat.
- The spices go in the tureenMace, allspice and cloves are beaten together and put in the tureen with the catsup and wine, and the hot soup poured over. This keeps the wine from cooking off and the spice bright; do not boil them in.
- Oxtail thickeningArrowroot and rice flour both thicken clear rather than cloudy, which suits a strained oxtail broth. Arrowroot breaks down with prolonged boiling, so stir it in slurried with cold water and serve promptly.
- YieldOnly Miss B. L.'s version states a finished quantity, two quarts; Mrs. Col. A. F. starts from two gallons and Mrs. Brown gives no measure of liquid at all. The oxtail, at three tails and a gallon of water reduced, serves six to eight.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (usually dated 1878) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from recipes sent in by Virginia housewives, which is why three cooks here give three different calf's head soups within a single page, each with its own spicing and its own idea of how long a head should boil. Mrs. Col. A. F. names the point of the exercise: "a good substitute for turtle soup." Green turtle soup was the prestige dish of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and American table, and mock turtle, built on a calf's head, was the standing domestic imitation, the gelatinous skin and varied textures of the head standing in for turtle meat, with wine, mace and catsup carrying the rest of the flavour. The sliced hard-boiled eggs dropped into the tureen are also part of the impersonation, filling the role of the turtle's eggs. That a Virginia household could put up two gallons of soup from a head, a shank and a piece of bacon says something about the economics of the dish as well: it was grand-looking food made from the cheapest part of the animal.