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.
Calf's Head
Split the head, take out the brains, boil till it will fall to pieces. Cut it up fine and season with pepper, salt and nutmeg to the taste; add one-quarter pound of butter, wineglassful wine, and the brains, which are not to be boiled with the head. Put in a dish and bake with or without paste.--Mrs. J. D.
A nose-to-tail dish from a period when a calf's head was cheap and a cook was expected to know what to do with it. The instructions assume knowledge the modern reader has to supply: how long the boiling takes, how hot the oven is, and what to do about the brains.
- Sourcing the headA split calf's head is a special-order item from a whole-animal butcher, not a supermarket purchase. Expect 8-10 lb with the tongue in; ask for it split, skinned and the nasal passages cleaned.
- Brains and legal restrictionsBovine brain is classed as specified risk material in the EU and UK for cattle over 12 months and is restricted in the US for cattle 30 months and older, so what your butcher may legally sell varies by jurisdiction. If brains are not available, the dish works without them, thickened instead with a little of the reduced cooking liquor.
- "Boil till it will fall to pieces"That is roughly 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which shreds the meat and clouds the liquid. The head is done when the cheek and jaw meat pulls away from the bone with a spoon.
- Keep the cooking liquorThe recipe discards it by implication, but a calf's head throws off a very gelatinous stock. Reduce a cup or two and add it to the chopped meat, or the baked dish comes out dry.
- The brains, cooked separatelySoak them in cold water, peel away the membrane, then poach 10-15 minutes in salted water with a splash of vinegar before folding them in. Adding them raw, as a literal reading allows, leaves them soft and undercooked in the centre of a baked dish.
- WineglassfulAbout 2 fl oz in nineteenth-century American use. Madeira or sherry would be plausible choices in a Virginia kitchen of the period, though the recipe specifies only "wine".
- Paste"Paste" is pastry: either a top crust over the dish or a full lined pie. Baked without it, the mixture behaves like a gratin and benefits from breadcrumbs and a little of the butter on top.
- Oven and time350F for 30 to 40 minutes, until bubbling at the edges and the crust is browned. The filling is already cooked; the bake is only to set and colour it.
- Butter and yieldA quarter pound of butter is generous but in proportion to the meat from a whole head, which is a great deal: figure 8 to 10 servings. Season the meat while it is still warm, when it takes salt and nutmeg best.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (generally dated to 1877, though it is variously cited as 1878 or 1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions credited only by initials, belongs to a tradition in which nothing from a slaughtered animal was wasted, and the head — a source of flavour — was a staple rather than a curiosity. Dishes of this kind sit at the root of mock turtle soup, the eighteenth-century English invention that used a boiled calf's head to imitate the gluey richness of green turtle, and the seasoning here is the mock-turtle signature: nutmeg, pepper, butter and a glass of wine. Baking the chopped meat under a pastry "paste" is essentially the older English pie treatment. Calf's head fell out of American home cooking over the twentieth century as butchering moved off the farm and offal lost prestige; the restrictions now placed on bovine brain, imposed after the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, have made the recipe as written hard to follow, though brains from younger cattle may still be legally sold in some jurisdictions.