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.
Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Boiled Calf's Head
Boiled Calf's Head
Plunge a fine, fresh, white calf's head into hot water, leaving it for one minute, lift it out and sharply rub it all over with a rough towel in order to remove all remaining hairs. Carefully cut the flesh, beginning at the center of the head, right down to the nostrils. Then, with a very sharp knife, bone it from the top to the base on both sides. Place in a saucepan two tablespoonfuls of flour, one gill of vinegar, one medium-sized, well cleaned and sliced carrot, one sound peeled onion, eighteen or twenty whole peppers and two or three pinches of salt. Pour in very gradually two quarts of cold water, briskly stirring until all is added. Cut up half of the head into six equal pieces, add them to the broth, as also the other whole half, and let all cook together over a moderate fire for an hour and a half. Lift up the pieces and the half head and place the six pieces on a dry napkin. Have ready a hot dish with a folded napkin over it, tastefully dress the six pieces on it, decorate with parsley or greens, and serve with any desired sauce. Place the remaining half head in a stone jar, strain the broth over it and preserve it in a cool place for any purpose desired.
Boiled Calf's Head with Vinaigrette Sauce Proceed the same as for boiled calf's head, laying a folded napkin on the dish and fixing thereon the half of the head. Decorate with parsley leaves, and serve with one pint of vinaigrette sauce in a sauceboat.
This is classic tête de veau as it was cooked in a large hotel kitchen, where a butcher upstairs did the hard part. The technique itself is simple boiling; almost everything that needs translating is about sourcing and about the white cooking liquid.
- Getting the headWhole calves' heads are a special order from a halal, kosher, Latin, or old-line butcher, and many will sell it already split, scalded and scraped, often with the brains and tongue removed. If it arrives cleaned and halved you can skip the plunging, rubbing and boning entirely; ask for the bones to come along for the pot.
- A gillOne gill is half a cup, so the vinegar here is 4 fl oz in two quarts of water — a sharp but not aggressive acidulation.
- What the flour and vinegar are forThis is a blanc. The flour clouds the liquid so the meat is not exposed to air at the surface and the acid keeps the gelatinous skin pale rather than grey. Whisk the flour into a little of the cold water first; adding two quarts "very gradually" to dry flour is how the original avoids lumps.
- Whole peppersEighteen to twenty whole black peppercorns, not ground pepper and not allspice. Tie them with the carrot and onion in cheesecloth if you want a clean broth.
- "A moderate fire"A bare simmer, barely trembling. A rolling boil shreds the skin and turns the liquid to glue. Skim the scum off in the first ten minutes.
- TimingNinety minutes suits a young calf; go by feel rather than the clock and cook until a skewer meets no resistance in the thickest part of the cheek, which can take two hours or more. Undercooked calf's head is rubbery and unpleasant.
- Vinaigrette sauce, 1896Not a salad dressing. A period vinaigrette of this kind is a sharp cold or tepid sauce of oil and vinegar with chopped aromatics such as shallot, capers and herbs, and sometimes chopped hard-boiled egg; boiled head was also served with other sharp sauces. Check the book's own vinaigrette entry for its exact composition.
- The napkinThe folded napkin on a hot dish is there to soak up liquid so the meat is not sitting in a puddle. It is period service; a warmed platter and a slotted spoon do the same job.
- Keeping the second halfThe stone jar in a cool place was a pre-refrigeration larder. Cool the meat and strained broth quickly, refrigerate covered, and use within three days — the broth will set to a firm jelly, which is exactly what you want for a cold pressed tête de veau or vinaigrette dish.
- YieldA whole head feeds ten to twelve; the six pieces sent to table here serve six, with the other half held back for a second meal.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially the French repertoire of a grand American hotel written down at length, which is why an organ-and-offal dish like this sits comfortably in it. Boiled calf's head is tête de veau, a Parisian bistro and charcuterie standard, and it was cheap, gelatinous, and prized precisely for the varied textures of skin, cheek and gelatin that modern eaters have mostly lost the taste for. Its American afterlife is mock turtle soup: calf's head boiled in exactly this way, then cut up in a rich brown broth, was the standard stand-in for green turtle once real turtle grew scarce and costly, and nineteenth-century cookbooks print the two recipes side by side. The instruction to save half the head in a jar of its own broth is a reminder that hotel kitchens and household kitchens shared the same economy — nothing on a bought head went to waste, and the set jelly was the starting point for a second dish.