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, Collared
INGREDIENTS.-A calf's head, 4 tablespoonfuls of minced parsley, 4 blades of pounded mace, 1/2 1/2 teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, white pepper to taste, a few thick slices of ham, the yolks of 6 eggs boiled hard. AVERAGE COST, 5s. 6d.
Scald the head for a few minutes; take it out of the water, and with a blunt knife scrape off all the hair. Clean it nicely, divide the head and remove the brains.
CALF'S HEAD, FRICASSEED.
Boil it tender enough to take out the bones, which will be in about 2 hours. When the head is boned, flatten it on the table, sprinkle over it a thick layer of parsley, then a layer of ham, and then the yolks of the eggs cut into thin rings and put a seasoning of pounded mace, nutmeg and white pepper between each layer; roll the head up in a cloth, and tie it up as tightly as possible. Boil it for 4 hours, and when it is taken out of the pot, place a heavy weight on the top, the same as for other collared meats. Let it remain till cold; then remove the cloth and binding, and it will be ready to serve.
TIME.-Altogether, 6 hours.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Calf's Head, Fricasseed. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS.- The remains of a boiled calf's head, 1½ pint of the liquor in which the head was boiled, 1 blade of pounded mace, 1 onion minced, a bunch of savoury herbs, salt and white wepper to taste, thickening of butter and flour, the yolks of 2 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, forcemeat balls. AVERAGE Cost, exclusive of the meat, 6d.
Remove all the bones from the head, and cut the meat into nice square pieces. Put 1½ pint of the liquor it was boiled in into a saucepan, with mace, onions, herbs and seasoning in the above proportion; let this simmer gently for hour, then strain it and put in the meat. When quite hot through, thicken the gravy with a little butter rolled in flour, and just before dishing the fricassee, put in the beaten yolks of eggs, and lemon-juice; but be particular, after these two latter ingredients are added, that the sauce does not boil, or it will curdle.
Garnish with forcemeat balls and curled slices of broiled bacon. To insure the sauce being smooth, it is a good plan to dish the meat first, and then to add the eggs to the gravy: when these are set, the sauce may be poured over the meat.
TIME.-Altogether, 11 hour.
Calf's Head, Hashed. (Cold Meat Cookery.) - INGREDIENTS. -The remains of a cold boiled calf's head, 1 quart of the liquor in which it was boiled, a faggot of savoury herbs, 1 onion, 1 carrot, a strip of lemon-peel, 2 blades of pounded mace, salt and white pepper to taste, a very little cayenne, rather more than 2 tablespoonfuls of sherry, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 1 tablespoonful of mushroom ketchup, forcemeat balls. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 9d.
CALF'S HEAD, TO CARVE.
Cut the meat into neat slices, and put the bones and trimmings into a stewpan with the above proportion of liquor that the head was boiled in. Add a bunch of savoury herbs, 1 onion, 1 carrot, a strip of lemon-peel, and 2 blades of pounded mace, and let these boil for 1 hour, or until the gravy is reduced nearly half. Strain it into a clean stewpan, thicken it with a little butter and flour, and add a flavouring of sherry, lemon-juice and ketchup, in the above proportion; season with pepper, salt and a little cayenne; put in the meat, let it gradually warm through, but not boil more than two or three minutes. Garnish the dish with forcemeat balls and pieces of bacon rolled and toasted, placed alternately, and send it to table very hot.
TIME. Altogether, 1½ hour.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Calf's Head, Moulded. (Cold Meat Cookery.)-INGREDIENTS. - The remains of a calf's head, some thin slices of ham or bacon, 6 eggs boiled hard, 1 dessertspoonful of salt, pepper, mixed spice, and parsley, 1/2 pint of good white gravy. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 1s. 4d.
Cut the head into thin slices. Butter a tin mould, cut the yolks of eggs in half, and put some of them round the tin; sprinkle some of the parsley, spice, &c., over it; then put in the head and the bacon in layers, adding occasionally more eggs and spice till the whole of the head is used. Pour in the gravy, cover the top with a thin paste of flour and water, and bake 3/4 of an hour. Take off the paste, and, when cold, turn it out.
TIME.-From to 1 hour to bake the preparation.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Four related preparations: a collared (rolled and pressed) calf's head, and three ways with what is left of a boiled one. The techniques are sound; the shopping is the hard part.
- Sourcing the headA whole calf's head is a special order from a butcher, and post-BSE specified risk material rules restrict the sale of bovine skull and brain (strictly, for animals over 12 months), so in practice what you will be offered is boned head meat, cheek and tongue rather than the intact head Beeton scalds and scrapes. Ask for tête de veau, which often arrives already cleaned and boned, and sometimes rolled — the scalding, scraping and boning steps drop away.
- The pressing is the pointFor the collared version, the cloth must be tied hard enough to force out air pockets, and the weight goes on while the roll is still hot. The gelatin from the head sets as it cools and glues the layers together; a slack roll or a cold press gives slices that fall apart.
- Boiling timesSix hours in total is generous even for veal head. Two hours to bone is realistic; the wrapped roll needs a bare simmer of about two and a half to three hours, not a rolling boil, or the meat shreds inside the cloth.
- Do not boil the fricasseeThe hinge of the fricasseed version is stated in the original and worth repeating: once the egg yolks and lemon juice go in, the sauce must not come back to the boil or it curdles. Beeton's own suggestion — plate the meat, finish the sauce off the heat, then pour it over — is the reliable route.
- Archaic measures and termsA blade of mace is one piece of the dried aril, very roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon ground. A faggot or bunch of savoury herbs is a bouquet garni of parsley, thyme and bay. "Thickening of butter and flour" means beurre manié, equal weights kneaded cold and whisked in. "Good white gravy" is unthickened veal or chicken stock, not a brown sauce.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not the tomato condiment. It is still made commercially in Britain; a mixture of soy sauce and a little Worcestershire gets close in a pinch.
- Oven for the moulded versionBeeton gives no heat. Bake at 325–350F; the flour-and-water paste over the top is a seal to keep the surface from drying, and can be replaced with foil. The book allows three quarters of an hour to an hour.
- Forcemeat ballsThe garnish assumed throughout is a veal or bacon forcemeat bound with egg and breadcrumbs, rolled small and fried or poached in the gravy. Beeton gives it as a separate entry; without it the dish looks bare, so plan for it in advance.
- Yield and seasonA collared calf's head makes a large cold joint and will feed a table of ten or more if cut thin. "Seasonable from March to October" reflects the seasonal supply of the period and has no bearing on modern availability.
Collaring — boning a cut, layering it with herbs and seasoning, rolling it in a cloth and pressing it under weight until cold — was one of the standard English methods for turning cheap, gelatinous cuts into something that could be sliced neatly on a cold table, and it was applied to breast of veal, pig's head, eel and beef flank as readily as to a calf's head. The calf's head itself was a mainstay of Victorian economical cookery: it was cheap, it yielded a great deal of gelatin, and its boiling liquor did double duty as the base for mock turtle soup, which is why Beeton's household reader was expected to find three further dishes in the remains. The grouping here under "Cold Meat Cookery" is characteristic of the book's whole approach, in which the second and third appearances of a joint were treated as a planning problem rather than an afterthought. Tastes changed sharply in the twentieth century, and while calf's head survives in French cooking as tête de veau — still a bistro dish, usually served hot with sauce gribiche — the English collared version has largely gone.