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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To Stew a Calf's Head
447. Boil the head, if convenient, the day before it is wanted, till the bones will come out easily. The following day brown it before the fire, then put it in a stewpan, with a quart of good and well-flavoured gravy, a bunch of sweet herbs, and a little onion; let it simmer for an hour, take it out and add to the gravy a glass of white wine, and the juice of half a lemon with a little of the peel grated. Dish it up nicely, and garnish with brain cakes and egg balls, and a few slices of rolled bacon. When the bones are taken out, the head may be larded with bacon by way of variety.
For a corner dish half a head would be sufficient. The remains may be served a second day in slices as hashed calves' head, and afterwards laid while hot into a mould, with the garnish and gravy intermixed, and served cold at breakfast or luncheon. Ox-cheek may be stewed in the same way.
This is a Victorian corner dish built around a whole boiled calf's head and garnished with cakes made from the brains. The garnish, and in most countries the head itself, put it outside what can be cooked today.
- Why the brain cakes are the problemBrain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the infectious agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Eating them is the recognised route by which variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease passed to humans; the disease is untreatable and fatal, and no cooking temperature destroys the agent.
- The head is not just a containerSkull contents, tonsils and the spinal column of cattle are controlled as specified risk material in the UK and EU, but the rules are age-banded: tonsils at all ages, brain and skull for animals over twelve months, vertebral column for older cattle. Calves' heads therefore remain legally sold in some European countries, though a bones-in, brain-intact head of the kind assumed here is not something to seek out.
- No safe substitution is impliedReplacing the brain cakes while still stewing a bone-in head does not necessarily solve the problem, since skull and vertebral tissue are also controlled once the animal is old enough for those rules to bite. If you want a stewed head dish, work from a current recipe using a permitted cut.
- Egg balls and rolled baconThe other garnishes are innocuous in themselves: egg balls are hard yolks pounded with raw yolk and flour, rolled into pellets and poached, and rolled bacon is a thin rasher rolled and grilled. Both appear across nineteenth-century cookery as standard trimmings for stews and turtle soups.
- Quantities, for readingA quart of gravy is 40 imperial fluid ounces, about 1.1 litres. A "glass" of white wine in books of this date is roughly a wineglassful, 2 to 2.5 fluid ounces.
- Ox-cheek is a different matterThe closing line offering ox-cheek points to the one part of this entry that survives in modern cooking. Cheek is ordinary muscle meat, sold widely, and braises for two to three hours; it carries none of the concerns above.