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Calf's Head in Tortue
Cut the meat of half a cold-boiled calf's head into small pieces. Mix one wine-glassful of sherry with one-half pint of well reduced stock, add to this the yolks of six hard boiled eggs and the whites cut into small pieces, three chopped gherkins, six quenelles of veal forcemeat, the pieces of head and a little cayenne pepper. Place the saucepan over the fire till the contents are hot. Pile the pieces of head in the middle of a hot dish, pour the sauce and eggs round it, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve. Calf's Head, Royal Style This is considered by all epicures the very best of calf's head dishes. In the center of a silver dish is set a forcemeat loaf made from the fragments of the heads and necks used, scraps of veal, tongue and other things. About this are laid, overlapping each other, discs of the meat off the head, and between these alternately a blanched cockscomb and three button mushrooms, diminishing in size upwards. The ears scored and stuffed with a truffle in each, are placed on the loaf with truffles between them, and fried bread wedge-shaped croutons are ranged round the loaf, with truffles set on the base of every crouton. A few sprigs of fried parsley are sometimes added, and the whole is served with royal sauce.
A dish built on offal cookery that has largely left American kitchens. The first recipe is workable if you can source the head; the "Royal Style" paragraph that follows is a description of a presentation rather than a method, and reads as a note to a kitchen that already knew how to do it.
- Start with the head already cookedThe recipe assumes a cold-boiled calf's head is already on hand. Simmering a split head with aromatics takes roughly 2 to 3 hours until the meat slips from the bone; it is then pressed and chilled before being cut up.
- SourcingCalf's head is a special order from a halal, Latin American, or full-service butcher, often frozen and split. Cooks who cannot get one usually build the dish from veal cheeks, tongue and shank, which give the same mix of gelatinous and lean meat, though not the ears.
- A wine-glassfulBy the conventional period measure a wine-glass is about 2 fluid ounces, roughly a quarter cup of sherry. Half a pint of well-reduced stock is one cup, and "well reduced" is doing real work here: the sauce should coat, not pool.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerSix hard-boiled yolks are the thickener, broken down into a wine-and-stock reduction. Held at a bare steam they work into a smooth, slightly grainy sauce; a hard boil will only drive off liquid and make the sauce coarse.
- QuenellesSix quenelles of veal forcemeat means small dumplings of ground veal bound with panade and egg, poached gently in stock until just set, then added at the end. Poaching water at a full boil will break them; hold it at about 175F.
- Cockscombs and blanchingThe Royal Style garnish calls for blanched cockscombs, a standard Escoffier-era luxury item that is essentially unobtainable now. Omit them; the button mushrooms and truffles carry the same visual rhythm.
- Royal sauceThe term is not explained here. In period usage it generally means a rich veal velouté or allemande enriched with cream and egg yolk, sometimes with truffle, though usage varied from kitchen to kitchen.
- YieldHalf a head with six quenelles and six eggs will serve roughly four to six. Serve it immediately in a heated dish, as the gelatin in the head meat sets fast as it cools.
"In tortue" is French for turtle-style, and the name records a substitution rather than an ingredient: green turtle was the great luxury soup meat of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and calf's head, with its mix of lean meat, gelatinous skin and soft cartilage, was the accepted stand-in. That is the whole logic behind mock turtle soup, and the seasonings here are the turtle vocabulary as well: sherry, cayenne, hard-boiled egg often said to stand in for turtle eggs, and forcemeat quenelles traditionally explained as standing in for the turtle's own bits. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 from his years as ma tre d'h tel at the Waldorf, catalogued a great many such dishes because a fashionable American hotel kitchen of the period was working directly out of the French repertoire, where nothing on an animal was wasted and elaborate presentation was the point. The "Royal Style" entry, with its cockscombs, truffles and tiered mushrooms, is a fair snapshot of what that meant before the taste for offal and for architectural garnish both faded in the twentieth century.