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
Plain boiled. -The English way. Take a whole or half a head. Scald it well, and let it soak for an hour or two in cold water. Then simmer it for an hour and a half in water enough to make it swim, and with a faggot of pot-herbs. Serve it with maître d'hôtel sauce (parsley and butter) poured over it; and let it be garnished with bacon or pig's cheek, with the tongue nicely trimmed, and with the brains which have been cooked apart.
The French way. The head or half-head is first boned, then blanched as above, then cut in pieces, keeping the ear apart with a good base to it, then simmered for an hour and a half with the faggot of pot-herbs. The pieces of calf's head are next drained, the tongue is trimmed, and all are served in naked simplicity on an oval dish ; the ear-pieces, which are considered the tit-bits, being made conspicuous in the arrangement. It is eaten either hot or cold with a cruet sauce. As many people like to make this sauce in proportions selected by themselves, it is usual to serve with it, on a plate and in separate heaps, capers, chives and parsley-the last two chopped.
Calf's Head en Tortue. - Prepared as above in the French way, but heated up and served in a Turtle Relish.
Calf's Head à la Financière. As before, but with the Financial Relish.
Calf's Head Soup (better known as Mock Turtle). - See Turtle.
A butcher's-shop dish written for cooks who bought heads whole and knew what to do with them. The technique survives intact; the shopping is the hard part.
- SourcingA calf's head must be ordered from a butcher, usually split and with the skull-bone removed, and often several days ahead. Ask for it cleaned and the hairs singed, which saves the initial scalding entirely.
- BrainsIn the UK and EU, bovine skull and brain from animals over twelve months are classed as specified risk material and cannot be sold for food; rules on younger calves vary by country, and in the US brain sales are also restricted. Cooking does not destroy prions. Unless your butcher can supply brains legally and vouch for their origin, leave that garnish out.
- Scald and soakThe soaking is for blood, not flavour. Two or three changes of cold water, or a running trickle, gives the pale colour the dish depends on. A spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar in the blanching water helps keep it white.
- Faggot of pot-herbsA tied bundle: parsley stalks, thyme, bay, a leek or celery stick, sometimes an onion stuck with cloves. Tying it means you can lift it out whole before serving.
- TimingKettner gives an hour and a half for whole or half head alike. A whole bone-in head may well want longer, at a bare shiver, tested with a skewer at the thickest part of the cheek. The tongue often needs longer than the rest and is easier cooked alongside, then peeled while hot.
- Maitre d'hotel sauceKettner glosses it himself as parsley and butter, meaning the English melted-butter sauce with chopped parsley and lemon, not the modern compound butter pat.
- Cruet sauceThe cruet stand held oil and vinegar among other condiments, so this is likely an oil-and-vinegar dressing, sharpened at the table from the separate heaps of capers, chives and parsley. In effect the diner builds something close to a cold sauce ravigote to taste.
- The relishes"Turtle Relish" and "Financial Relish" are Kettner's Englished names for sauce tortue and sauce financiere, both rich madeira-based brown sauces; tortue is scented with basil, marjoram and a little cayenne, financiere carries mushrooms and truffle. Both are cross-references to their own entries in the book.
- YieldA half-head serves four to six as a main course; the meat is gelatinous and filling, so keep the accompaniments sharp.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, is a dictionary of dishes rather than a cookbook, which is why this entry sets the English and French treatments side by side and then hands the reader off to other headwords. Calf's head was cheap, plentiful offal in Victorian Britain, prized for its gelatine as much as its meat, and the ear cartilage that Dallas calls the tit-bit was valued for exactly the crisp-soft texture that has since fallen out of British taste. Its most famous descendant is mock turtle soup, invented in the eighteenth century to imitate the green fatty richness of real turtle at a fraction of the cost; the boiled head also carried political freight, being the centrepiece of the Calves' Head Club dinners held to mark the execution of Charles I, a tradition much written about in the eighteenth century and hard to document reliably.