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 one-half liver)
Calf's Head Soup (Take one-half liver)
Take one-half liver and the head of a mutton, veal or beef, and boil until the meat drops from the bone. Cut up fine and add one half the brains; then: 1 onion. 1 spoonful spice. 1/2 spoonful cloves. 1 spoonful black pepper and a piece of mace. 3 tablespoonfuls flour. 3 tablespoonfuls flour, and salt to the taste.
Put in enough water at first as adding it makes the soup thin. Cut up three hard boiled eggs, and add, when done, one glass of wine. A little brandy and walnut catsup, with more eggs, will improve it, though it is delightful soup as it is.--Mrs. W. A. C.
Calf's Head Soup.
Clean the head, laying aside the brains. Put the head in a gallon of water, with pepper and salt. Boil to pieces and take out bones; return to the pot with- 1 teacup of mushroom or tomato catsup. 1 teaspoonful allspice. 1 lemon rind grated. 1 grated nutmeg. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 teacup of browned flour. Fry, and add the brains when nearly ready for the table. About five minutes before serving, add: 1 teacup of wine. 1 teaspoonful cloves. 1 teaspoonful mace. When sent to the table have two hard boiled eggs sliced and floating on top.--Mrs. J. D.
Calf's Head Soup.
Take a large calf's head and boil it with four gallons water a d a little salt; when tender, bone and chop it fine, keeping out the brains, and put the meat back in the pot and boil down to a tureenful. Half an hour before serving the soup, add: 1 tablespoonful mustard. 1 teaspoonful black pepper. 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves. 1 teaspoonful mace. 1 teaspoonful nutmeg.
Brown a cup of flour to thicken and just as the soup is dished, add one cup walnut catsup, and one cup port or claret wine.
The brains must be beaten up with an egg, fried in little cakes, and dropped in the tureen.--Miss N.
Three versions of the same Virginia standby, all of them built on a whole head simmered to collapse and finished with brains. The brain is the problem: it is not an optional garnish in any of these three, and bovine brain is no longer an ordinary food ingredient.
- Why the brains rule this outEvery version here calls for brains — beaten with egg and fried into cakes, or stirred in near the end. Brain and spinal tissue from cattle are classed as specified risk material because of BSE, and prion infectivity is not reduced by boiling, browning or frying. Long cooking, which destroys bacteria, does nothing here.
- The regulatory positionIn the United States brain from cattle 30 months and older is prohibited in human food as specified risk material, and comparable SRM rules apply in the UK and EU; brain from younger calves is not caught by the same prohibition, and sheep are treated differently again. The first version allows the head of "mutton, veal or beef," so depending on the animal it may or may not involve restricted material. Either way, a whole beef or veal head sold complete with brain is not something a modern butcher can be expected to hand over as a matter of course.
- Volume and vesselMiss N. starts with four gallons of water and boils down to "a tureenful" — roughly three to four quarts, so a reduction of about four to one over many hours. This assumed a large stockpot on a wood range that could be left alone all morning, and a household with a soup tureen at the centre of the table.
- Ambiguous measuresMrs. W. A. C.'s "1 spoonful spice" and "1/2 spoonful cloves" give no size of spoon and no definition of "spice" — in this period it often meant allspice. The line "3 tablespoonfuls flour" appears twice, which looks like a printer's repetition rather than a call for six tablespoons.
- Browned flour"A teacup of browned flour" means dry flour toasted in a skillet until nut-coloured, a common Southern thickener and colouring agent before commercial gravy browning. A teacup in recipes of this period is reckoned variously, commonly at around six fluid ounces, i.e. roughly three-quarters of a modern cup. Browning weakens flour's thickening power, which is why the quantity looks so large.
- Walnut catsupMade from green walnuts, vinegar, anchovy and spice, was a dark salty condiment in the same family as mushroom catsup and Worcestershire. It has largely disappeared from shops, though a few British firms still make it; the tomato catsup Mrs. J. D. allows as a substitute is a much sweeter thing than the 1870s article.
- If you want the dishMock turtle soup and the surviving European head dishes are made today from cheek, tongue and head meat alone, with no brain. Work from a current recipe from a butcher or a modern source rather than adapting these.
Calf's head soup is the American descendant of English mock turtle soup, which used a boned calf's head — prized for its gelatinous texture — to imitate the costly green turtle that eighteenth-century London ranked above all other soups. The spicing here is the giveaway: mace, cloves, nutmeg, lemon rind, mustard, walnut catsup and a glass of wine at the last minute are the classic mock-turtle seasonings, and the hard-boiled egg slices floating on top are generally explained as standing in for turtle eggs. That three contributors to Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) each sent in a version says something about how the book was assembled — Marion Cabell Tyree gathered receipts from some 250 Virginia housewives and printed them side by side, variations and all, rather than editing them into one authoritative method. It also shows a household economy in which the whole animal was expected to be used, and in which a head bought cheap could be turned into a company dish through spice, wine and several hours of unattended simmering.