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Hashed Calf's Head
Cut any desirable quantity of cold boiled calf's head into pieces about the size of a small apple. Put two or three ounces of butter into a saucepan to melt, mix in three tablespoonfuls of flour, and add one or two breakfast cupfuls of veal stock. When thoroughly incorporated add a few small mushrooms, salt and pepper to suit the taste, and boil well for ten minutes or so. Remove the saucepan to the side of the fire, add the hashed meat and allow it to get hot without boiling. Remove the pan from the fire, stir in the yolks of two eggs beaten up with the juice of a lemon and strained, and also add a little chopped parsley or tarragon. Turn the hash out onto a dish, and serve.
A classic French liaison finished in the pan: the whole dish stands or falls on temperature control at the end. Everything before the egg yolks is a simple veloute.
- Never let it boil after the yolks go inThe egg yolks and lemon juice thicken by coagulating; brought to a simmer they curdle and the sauce breaks into grains. Pull the pan off the heat entirely, stir the yolks in, and serve at once.
- "Remove to the side of the fire"On a coal range the cooler edge held food below boiling. On a modern hob, the lowest setting or a pan set on a diffuser does the same job: hot, with no bubbles breaking the surface.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup was larger than a teacup and is usually reckoned at somewhere around 8-10 fluid ounces; take it as roughly a standard cup. Two cups of stock to three tablespoons of flour gives a light coating sauce; one cup gives something close to a thick binder for the meat.
- Calf's headSold whole or halved by halal and Latin American butchers and by some specialty meat suppliers, usually to order. Half a head, simmered two to three hours with aromatics until the meat slips from the bone, then cooled and pressed, yields roughly 1.5-2 lb of usable meat and skin. Cook it the day before, as the recipe assumes.
- What the pieces should beCold boiled head is a mixture of gelatinous skin and cheek meat, plus the tongue if it came with the head. Cut it while cold and firm; at room temperature it turns slack and tears.
- Mushrooms"A few small mushrooms" most likely means whole button mushrooms. Sauteing 4-6 oz of quartered chestnut mushrooms in a little butter first keeps them from watering down the sauce.
- Strain the yolk-lemon mixtureThe instruction is not fussiness. Straining removes bits of chalaza and any set albumen, which would show up as white threads in a pale sauce.
- YieldThe recipe leaves the quantity of meat open; the sauce as given would suit about four. Good with boiled potatoes or plain rice, and a sharp vinaigrette-dressed salad to cut the richness.
Calf's head was standard nineteenth-century eating on both sides of the Atlantic, from the French tete de veau to the mock turtle soup of English and American households, which used the gelatinous head to imitate the texture of green turtle. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled this book in 1896 for the Waldorf, a hashed head in an egg-and-lemon-thickened sauce was hotel cooking of a familiar kind: an economical cut dressed up with a classical liaison, the same technique used for blanquette de veau and for poulet a la reine. The dish declined in America, along with most offal on restaurant menus, though it survives in France as a bistro standard.