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Baked Calf's Head
Clean and boil a calf's head until tender, cut it in two and temporarily set aside the best half. Remove the meat from the other half, cutting it into uniform pieces about the size of an oyster. Over the uncut half, place bits of butter as large as hickory nuts; sprinkle with pepper and then dredge with flour until it is white. Now place it in a dripping-pan on bars or muffin rings, pour in a cup of water, put it into a hot oven, turn occasionally so that it will brown evenly, basting once or twice. In the meantime dip the cut pieces in flour or batter and fry a delicate brown in hot lard or beef dripping; season with salt, pepper and slices of lemon, if liked. Remove the roast to a hot dish, lay the fried pieces around it and cover with a tin to keep it warm. Put the gravy from the dripping-pan into the pan the pieces were fried in, add the lemon slices and one tablespoon of browned flour; also, if needed, a little hot water. Boil up once, strain and serve with the meat.
A two-part dish from the era when a whole calf's head was a cheap, respectable Sunday roast: half is roasted on the bone, half is cut up and fried, and both are served together under one gravy. The work is nearly all in the boiling and the sourcing.
- Sourcing the headNo supermarket carries this. Order from a halal, Latin American or old-line butcher and ask for a calf (not beef) head, split, with the skin on and the eyes and brain removed. Regulations on bovine skull and central nervous tissue mean many suppliers will only sell heads from young animals, and some will not sell them at all.
- The first boil is the whole dish"Until tender" means 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, with an onion, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a good spoonful of salt. Undercook it and no amount of oven time will fix the texture; the meat should pull cleanly from the bone before you split it. Save the cooking liquid.
- Hot ovenRead that as somewhere in the 400 to 450F range. The half-head is already cooked through, so the oven is only browning and crisping the floured surface -- roughly 30 to 40 minutes, turning as directed.
- Bits of butter as large as hickory nutsA shelled hickory nut is in the neighborhood of a hazelnut, so figure a teaspoon or two each and a few tablespoons of butter over the whole half.
- Bars or muffin ringsAn improvised rack. Any wire rack that lifts the meat clear of the water in the pan does the same job; the cup of water is there to keep the drippings from scorching, not to braise.
- Dredge until it is whiteThis is a thick flour coating, not a dusting, and it wants the meat still damp from the pot to hold. It sets into a crust as the butter melts through it.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a skillet or a low oven until it is the color of cinnamon. It thickens less than raw flour but adds the roasted color and flavor the period expected of a brown gravy; make more than you need and keep it in a jar.
- Frying fatBeef dripping or lard as written, about half an inch deep at 350 to 365F. Fry in batches so the pieces brown rather than steam, and salt them the moment they leave the fat.
- YieldA calf's head feeds six to eight generously. Serve with something sharp -- pickles, a caper sauce, or more lemon than the recipe suggests -- since the meat itself is rich and gelatinous.
Calf's head was a set piece of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, valued because it was cheap, because it fed a crowd, and because its gelatinous texture was admired rather than tolerated: the same quality that made mock turtle soup, which is built on a boiled calf's head standing in for the turtle that most households could not get. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, aimed its cook book at the practical middle-class housekeeper, and a recipe like this one shows the thrift behind that audience -- one head yields a roast and a fry and a gravy, with the boiling liquid left over for soup. Dishes of this kind faded from American kitchens across the twentieth century as offal and head meat lost social standing, though they survive in cabeza tacos, testa and other traditions that never abandoned them.