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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Diagram of Cuts of Veal
cooked in half an hour and should be removed, but kept hot. Take out all the bones from the head, but keep it as nearly whole as possible. Butter a baking dish; lay the brains in it, then the head on them; season plentifully with powdered cloves, salt and pepper; stick small pieces of butter rolled in flour wherever there is a crack or opening, and dust with flour. Mix a little currant jelly with two cups of the broth the head was boiled in, and pour over the head; set in a hot oven and bake until very brown, basting several times.
The text is a fragment — the opening instructions for boiling the calf's head belong to a preceding paragraph — and it centres on a tissue that is no longer considered safe food. The notes below explain the terms and the risk rather than offering a way to proceed.
- Why this cannot be madeThe dish is built on calf's brains, and bovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The prion agent is not destroyed by baking, boiling or any domestic cooking, and the human illness it causes, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is untreatable and fatal.
- It is also largely unavailableIt is also hard to obtain -- After the BSE controls of the 1990s many countries classed the skull, brain and spinal cord of older cattle as specified risk material and excluded them from the food supply: in the EU the skull and brain of cattle over 12 months, in the US of cattle 30 months and over. Brains from very young calves are still legally sold in some places, but the whole head and brains this recipe assumes are not something an ordinary butcher today will supply.
- The fragment problemThe passage begins mid-instruction: something "cooked in half an hour" is the brains, lifted out of the pot in which the whole head has been simmering. Without the preceding page there is no boiling time, no water quantity and no seasoning for the broth, so the recipe is incomplete even setting the safety issue aside.
- "A hot oven"In a book of this period a hot oven would be somewhere in the region of 400-450F, though period sources vary and give no exact equivalent. It is recorded here only for reading the text, not for making it.
- Butter rolled in flourSmall nuggets of flour-worked butter pressed into gaps were a common nineteenth-century thickener and sealer, the same idea as a beurre manie. They melt into the basting liquid and glaze the surface as it browns.
- Currant jelly in the gravyRedcurrant jelly stirred into the cooking broth was a routine finish for veal and game, adding acidity and sheen. That element of the dish survives harmlessly in modern sauces for veal chops or roast loin.
- If you want the dishLook for a current recipe using cuts of veal that remain in the food supply — cheek, shin or shoulder braised whole will give the same soft gelatinous result the head was prized for.
Boiled and then browned calf's head was one of the great set pieces of Anglo-American cookery from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth: a head was cheap, fed a table, and yielded gelatine for mock turtle soup as a by-product. The brains, poached separately because they cook in minutes while the head takes hours, were treated as the delicacy of the animal and were often served on toast, in a cream sauce, or as here bedded under the head itself. Whole-head cookery of this kind faded first from fashion and then, for cattle, from legality: the BSE epidemic identified in British herds in the mid-1980s led to rules across Europe and North America restricting bovine brain and spinal tissue in human food. Pages like this one are now read as a record of how thoroughly an animal was once used, rather than as working instructions.