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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Braised Calf's Head
Clean and bone the head. Prepare a sufficient quantity of finely-chopped lean veal and fat bacon to stuff it. Season the stuffing with sweet herbs, salt and pepper, and bind it with the beaten yolks of three eggs. Stuff the head, sew it up securely to prevent the stuffing from oozing out and wrap it in a cloth. Line a braising pan with slices of veal and bacon; also a few slices of carrots; put in the head with a bunch of thyme and parsley and two bay leaves; season to taste with spice, and pour in one pint of broth and one-half pint of white wine. Stew the head for four hours. When cooked take it out of the cloth, put it on a hot dish and garnish with a financiere stew. Strain the cooking liquor of the head into a small clean stewpan, mix a wineglassful of Madeira wine with it; boil it a few minutes, then pour it over the head, and serve.
Calfs Head, Financiere For the preparation of this neat dish all the principal parts are prepared as for a stew--the ears are scalded and stuffed, the brains formed into cakes. The pieces of meat are cut into large discs and arranged round a forcemeat loaf made of the trimmings, and around this again, either on the same dish or upon one below it, the ears and brain-cakes are arranged with blanched olives and button mushrooms. Skewers garnished with cockscombs, truffles and various other things, surmount the whole.
A full-dress tête de veau from the Waldorf kitchen, written for cooks who had a butcher who could bone a head and a larder full of garnish. The braise itself is straightforward; almost all the difficulty is in sourcing and in the finish.
- The hinge: keep the braise at a bare tremble"Stew the head for four hours" means a liquid that shivers rather than bubbles, roughly 180-190F. A rolling boil bursts the seam you have just sewn and turns the gelatinous skin stringy instead of silky.
- Sourcing the headA whole calf's head is a special order and a heavy one; weights vary a good deal, so ask the butcher to split, bone and singe it. Many will sell only half a head, or the boned and rolled cut sold as tete roulee, which takes the same braise in a more manageable shape.
- Cleaning is not optionalBefore stuffing, soak the boned head in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw the blood, then blanch it 10–15 minutes in acidulated water and refresh. Skipping this leaves an unmistakable barnyard note that no amount of Madeira covers.
- Brains and cockscombsBovine brain is regulated as specified risk material: in the US it may not enter the food supply from cattle 30 months and older, while in the UK and EU the threshold for the skull and brain is 12 months. Brain from young veal calves is not universally banned, but it is hard to buy in many places, and cockscombs are effectively unobtainable outside a few specialist trades. The financiere garnish can be built from mushrooms, olives, truffle and the forcemeat loaf, leaving the rest out.
- MeasuresA wineglassful of Madeira is about 2 fl oz. The "pint" and "half-pint" of broth and white wine are US measures here, so 2 cups and 1 cup. "Season to taste with spice" is unspecified; a warm mixture along the lines of quatre epices -- pepper, nutmeg, clove, ginger -- used with restraint suits the dish.
- The clothMuslin or several layers of cheesecloth, wrapped snugly and tied at both ends with kitchen twine, not knotted around the middle. It holds the stuffed head in shape and keeps the skin from tearing when you lift it out.
- Finishing the sauceThe strained liquor will be very gelatinous and quite fatty. Skim it hard, then reduce it by about a third before the Madeira goes in; the recipe's "boil it a few minutes" assumes a stock already concentrated by four hours in a lined pan.
- YieldA boned, stuffed half head will serve roughly 6-8 as a main course; a whole head with the full garnish is a platter for a considerably larger table.
Tête de veau was a set piece of nineteenth-century French cookery, and this is Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf version of it, published in his 1896 Cook Book — a volume assembled from the hotel's working repertoire and from the classical French service Tschirky had learned in New York's grand dining rooms. The garnish name financière is generally traced to the idea of a banker's extravagance: cockscombs, truffles, olives, mushrooms and quenelles, expensive trimmings piled on a cheap cut. That contrast is the whole point of the dish. A calf's head was among the least costly things in the market, and dressing it with truffles and Madeira, then crowning it with garnished skewers, was a display of kitchen labor rather than of ingredient cost. Both halves of the appeal are gone now — heads are no longer cheap or commonly butchered, and the brains and combs that finished the plate have largely been legislated or fashioned out of the Western kitchen.