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Calf's Head à la Terrapin
Wash and clean a calf's head, and cook until tender in boiling water to cover. Cool, and cut meat from cheek in small cubes. To two cups meat dice add one cup sauce made of two tablespoons butter, two tablespoons flour, and one cup White Stock, seasoned with one-half teaspoon salt, one-eighth teaspoon pepper, and a few grains cayenne. Add one-half cup cream and yolks of two eggs slightly beaten; cook two minutes and add two tablespoons Madeira wine.
A mock-terrapin stew built on the cheek meat of a calf's head, thickened with a rich egg-and-cream liaison. The head is the only real obstacle; everything after it is a straightforward velouté.
- The hinge: the egg yolksOnce the yolks and cream go in, the sauce must not boil. Two minutes over gentle heat is all it takes to thicken; a simmer will curdle the yolks and leave grainy specks through the dish. Temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce before adding them back.
- Sourcing a calf's headWhole heads are no longer a supermarket item and generally must be ordered from a halal or Latin butcher, or a farm abattoir, often split and with the brains removed. Two cups of cheek dice is roughly 12 oz of cooked meat; boned veal cheeks, sold by the pound, give the same gelatinous texture with none of the wrestling.
- "Cook until tender"A split calf's head needs 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, longer if it is large. Skim the scum that rises in the first twenty minutes. Cooling the head in its own liquid keeps the meat moist and makes it far easier to cut clean cubes.
- White StockFannie Farmer's White Stock is a veal-and-fowl stock, unbrowned and barely seasoned. The cooking liquid from the head itself is the obvious substitute, strained and reduced; a light unsalted chicken stock also works.
- Building the sauceTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup stock is a heavy-bodied velouté, and it is meant to be: the cream and yolks that follow thin it considerably. Cook the roux a minute or two without letting it color.
- The MadeiraStirred in at the very end, after the two minutes of cooking; the recipe does not say whether the pan is off the heat. Use a dry to medium Madeira (Sercial or Verdelho); the cheap cooking wine sold with added salt will throw the seasoning off.
- Yield and servingSomething over three cups, serving four as a first course. Terrapin and its imitations were commonly served in puff-pastry patty shells or over toast points, sometimes with lemon alongside.
"À la terrapin" means dressed like diamondback terrapin, the brackish-water turtle that was the great luxury of late nineteenth-century American dining, particularly in Baltimore and Philadelphia, where terrapin stewed with cream, egg yolks and Madeira was a fixture of club and hotel menus. Terrapin was expensive and, by the time this book went through its many editions, growing scarce from overharvesting; cooks answered with imitations built on cheaper gelatinous cuts, and a calf's head—cheap, richly collagenous, and a standard part of the butcher's trade when whole animals were broken down in the shop—was the usual stand-in. The same logic produced mock turtle soup, likewise built on a calf's head. The recipe is a fair snapshot of a kitchen that still expected a cook to buy a head, boil it, and pick it over.