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Baked Calf's Head
Have the butcher split open the head, remove the eyes and chop off the nose. Lay the head in salted water for half an hour; change Planned for &
The text on this leaf breaks off mid-sentence — it ends at "change" with a printer's note — so what survives is only the preparation of the head, not the baking. Treat the following as notes on the surviving fragment rather than a workable method.
- The recipe is incompleteEverything after the first change of water is missing: no oven temperature, no time, no stuffing or sauce. Anyone wanting to cook a calf's head should work from a complete modern or reprinted source and use this page as a record of period practice.
- Ordering the headA whole calf's head is a special order, and generally needs several days' notice. In the EU and UK, bovine skull, brain and eyes are specified risk material for animals over twelve months and are removed at slaughter; heads from young calves may be sold, but brain can be hard to obtain regardless of age. In the US, restrictions apply chiefly to brain and spinal cord from older cattle, and heads are commonly sold split.
- What the butcher's work involvesSplitting the skull is a job for a saw, and in a modern shop a bandsaw. The head also needs to be scalded and scraped or singed clean of hair, and the ear canals cleaned — jobs the recipe passes over and which are worth confirming when you order.
- The salt-water soakThe half hour in salted water, with the water changed (the instruction breaks off mid-sentence), works as a blood-draw, the same principle as soaking sweetbreads or tripe; it also rinses away bone dust from the saw and lightens the meat.
- Why it was baked and not just boiledBaked calf's head recipes of this period generally simmer the head first until the meat loosens, then finish it in the oven with stuffing and a coating of crumbs. The missing portion of this recipe most likely followed that pattern; a head put raw into an oven is unlikely to become tender.
- YieldA whole calf's head yields a great deal of gelatinous meat, enough for a large table, with the cooking liquor worth keeping as a stock or aspic base.
Calf's head was a standard piece of household economy well into the twentieth century, and cookbooks of Mrs. Fryer's era treated it as ordinary butchery rather than a curiosity: the cheek and tongue meat is generous, the skin turns to gelatin, and the broth sets to a jelly with no added help. It also carried social weight. Mock turtle soup, the great Victorian imitation of green turtle, was built on a boiled calf's head, whose gelatinous texture stood in for turtle fat, and the head appeared boiled with brain sauce, braised, or — as here — parboiled and finished in the oven under crumbs. Its disappearance from American kitchens has less to do with taste than with supply: as slaughter moved off the farm and into central packing plants, heads stopped arriving at the household door, and BSE controls — in Britain from 1989, across the EU around 2000-2001, and in the United States from 2004 — removed bovine skull and brain from the retail trade in much of the world. That a book aimed at ordinary home cooks could open with "have the butcher split open the head" says a good deal about how close the reader still was to the butcher's block.