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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Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Testa
No. 105. Testa di Vitello alla Sorrentina (Calf's Head) Ingredients: Calf's head, veal, sweetbread, truffles, mushrooms, pistacchio nuts, eggs, herbs, spice, stock, bacon, ham.
Boil a half calf's head well, and when it is half cold, bone it and fill it with a stuffing of veal, the calf's brains, sweetbread, truffles, mushrooms, pistacchio nuts, the yolks of two eggs, herbs, and a little spice. Then stitch it up and braize it in good stock, with some slices of bacon, ham, and a bunch of herbs. Serve with brain sauce mixed with cream.
No. 106. Testa di Vitello con Salsa Napoletana (Calf's Head) Ingredients: Calf's head, calf's liver, bacon, suet, truffles, almonds, olives, calf's brains, capers, spice, coriander seeds, herbs, ham, stock.
Boil half a calf's head, bone it and fill it with a stuffing made of four ounces of calf's liver, well chopped up and pounded in a mortar; two ounces of bacon, one ounce of suet, three truffles, sixalmonds, three olives, six coriander seeds, six capers, the calf's brains, a pinch of spice and a teaspoonful of chopped herbs.
Roll up the head, tie it up and put it into a stewpan with some bits of bacon, ham, and very good stock, and stew it slowly. Serve with Neapolitan sauce (No. 12), or with tomato sauce piquante (No. 10).
No. 107. Testa di Vitello alla Pompadour (Calf's Head) Ingredients: Calf's head, calf's brains, cream, eggs, truffles, cinnamon, stock, butter, Parmesan.
Boil and bone half a calf's head and fill it with a stuffing made of the calf's brains, a gill of cream, the yolks of two eggs, two truffles cut up, a little chopped ham, and a tiny pinch of cinnamon.
Boil it in good stock, and when it is sufficiently cooked take it out and mask it all over with a mixture of butter, yolk of egg, and a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan, then brown it in the oven and serve hot.
No. 108. Testa di Vitello alla Sanseverino (Calf's Head) Ingredients: Calf's head, sweetbread, fowl's liver, anchovies, herbs, capers, garlic, bacon, ham, Malmsey Muscat. or Boil and bone half a calf's head, and fill it with a stuffing made of half a pound of sweetbread, a fowl's liver, two anchovies, a teaspoonful of chopped herbs, a few chopped capers, and the calf's brains.
Roll the head up, stitch it together and traize it in half a tumbler of Malmsey or Australian Muscat (Burgoyne's), half a cup of very good white stock, some bits of ham and bacon, and a clove of garlic with two cuts. Cook it gently for four hours and serve it with its own sauce. Do not leave the garlic in longer than ten minutes.
No. 109. Testa di Vitello in Frittata (Calf's Head) Ingredients: Calf's head, eggs, Parmesan, ham, pepper, butter, croûtons.
A good rechauffé of calf's head may be made in the following manner :- After the head has been well boiled in good stock, cut it into slices and mask these with a mixture of eggs well beaten up, grated Parmesan, pepper, and chopped ham. Fry in butter, and garnish with fried parsley and fried croûtons. Serve with a sauce made of a quarter of a pint of good Béchamel (No. 3) and a dessert-spoonful of New Century sauce.
No. IIO. Zampetti (Calves' Feet) Ingredients: Calves' or pigs' feet, butter, leeks or small onions, parsley, salt, pepper, stock, tomatoes, eggs, cheese, cinnamon.
These five preparations of calf's head all turn on one ingredient that is no longer usable: the brains. Four of the five stuff the boned head with them, and No. 105 also finishes the dish with a brain sauce.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk material. They are the tissues that carry the infectious prion of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which in humans causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — invariably fatal, with no treatment and an incubation period that can run to decades.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not conventional pathogens. They are misfolded proteins that survive boiling, braising, four hours in stock, and the oven browning called for in No. 107. There is no time or temperature in a domestic kitchen that renders this tissue safe.
- The head itself is regulatedIn the EU, UK, US and elsewhere the skull, brain and eyes of cattle above a specified age (12 months in the EU and UK, 30 months in the US) are classed as specified risk material and must be removed from the food chain at slaughter. Rules for younger calves vary by country, but a half calf's head with the brains in place is at best difficult to obtain and in many places not legally available at all.
- No. 109 is not a way round itThe frittata is a rechauffe of head meat and contains no brains, but it still starts from a whole calf's head boiled in stock, which is hard to come by. Use a current recipe if you want to cook cheek or head meat.
- Terms in the text"Braize" is braise; "mask" means to coat completely; a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fluid ounces; "half a tumbler" of Malmsey is roughly four to five fluid ounces, though tumblers varied. "New Century sauce" and "Burgoyne's" Australian Muscat were proprietary products of the period and are long gone.
- Sweetbreads are a separate matterThymus and pancreas are not specified risk material and remain on sale. They are not a substitute here — none of these dishes survives the loss of the brains, which supply the binding and the richness the stuffings are built around.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) set out to teach English households Italian cooking at a time when calf's head was still a standard, thrifty joint on both sides of the Channel — cheap, gelatinous, and capable of being boned, stuffed and rolled into something that looked grand on a table. The regional epithets here are the selling point: alla Sorrentina and Salsa Napoletana tie the dish to the Bay of Naples, while alla Pompadour borrows the prestige of French court cookery, a habit of naming that ran through nineteenth-century restaurant menus generally. Brains, sweetbreads and liver were valued as much for texture as flavour, pounded in a mortar to make the smooth forcemeats that stuffed and enriched larger cuts. The whole genre effectively ended in Britain in the 1990s, when the BSE epidemic led to the removal of bovine head and nervous tissue from the food supply; calf's head, once ordinary enough to warrant five variations in a single chapter, disappeared from butchers' counters and has not returned.