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.

No. 1519

Calf's Head Plain or Vinaigrette

Tete de Veau au Naturel ou a la Vinaigrette

Choose a very white, fat and well cleaned calf's head, bone it entirely; split it in two to par-boil and when done, dry, singe and scrape it; remove the tongue, then lay it in cold water to steep for one hour. Suppress the sanguineous skin found on the brain and soak this for one hour; place in a saucepan with a quart of water, salt and vinegar, let boil slowly for fifteen minutes to cook it. Cut each half head into five pieces, namely: the ear cut off largely from the base, the eye, the snout and two cheek pieces; put one pound of chopped suet into a saucepan able to hold twelve quarts of water; add to it a quarter of a pound of flour and stir together on the fire for a few moments, then lay in quartered carrots and onions, a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme, bay leaf, a clove of garlic and two cloves, a dessertspoonful of whole peppers, salt and half a gill of vinegar, mix well and add five quarts of water; set this on the fire, stir till it boils, then put in the pieces of head and the tongue; let cook for two hours, and when it softens between the two fingers, remove the white skin covering both tongue and inside of the snout, drain off the pieces and wipe them dry. Dress the head simply on a dish or folded napkin, lay the slit ears in the center having turned them backward with the other pieces around the tongue and brains split lengthwise in two; garnish around with branches of parsley; and serve at the same time a sauce-boat of vinaigrette sauce (No. 634), also a saucerful of onions and parsley, both finely chopped, whole capers and vinegar pickles.

← No. 1518 Calf's Head en Tortue, Dressed Veal No. 1520 Kernel of Veal a la Duchess →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a butcher who will sell you a whole head and a kitchen with twelve-quart pots. The method itself is sound and still the standard French treatment; most of the work is sourcing and prep.

The hinge: cook it in a blancThe suet-and-flour liquid is not a sauce base — it is a blanc, a fat-and-flour bath that seals the meat from air and keeps the head white rather than grey. Skipping it, or substituting plain salted water, gives a dingy result no amount of trimming will fix. The flour should be stirred into the melted suet off a hard boil so it does not colour.
Sourcing the headBoned and split calf's head is a special order from a halal, kosher-style or old-line butcher, and many now sell only the rolled, pre-cleaned cheek and tongue rather than the whole head with ear, eye and snout. Brain from young calves is legal in the United States, but bovine brain from animals over the age-limit is classed as specified risk material and cannot be sold; in the UK and EU the rules are tighter still. Confirm the age of the animal with the butcher before buying brains.
MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of vinegar is 1/4 cup. A dessertspoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — call it two teaspoons of peppercorns. The quarter pound of flour to one pound of suet is roughly a cup of flour to about two cups of chopped fat.
The brains, separatelyBrains are poached apart from the head in acidulated water for fifteen minutes and no longer — they are already delicate and turn grainy with extended cooking. The hour-long soak and the removal of the bloody membrane are not optional; they are what makes the difference between clean and metallic.
Two hours is a floor, not a ruleRanhofer's real test is the useful one: the pieces should yield between two fingers. Ear and snout are almost pure collagen and may want longer than the cheek; pull each piece as it comes right rather than draining the pot at a fixed time.
Peel while hotThe white skin on the tongue and inside the snout lifts cleanly only while the meat is still steaming. Let it cool and you will be paring rather than peeling.
What goes with itSauce No. 634 is Ranhofer's vinaigrette, an oil-and-vinegar sauce; his own numbered recipe gives the seasonings. The accompanying saucer of chopped onion and parsley, capers and gherkins is the classic garniture and does the work of cutting the richness; a gribiche or ravigote serves a similar purpose.
YieldA whole head, dressed as ten pieces plus tongue and brains, will serve a table of eight or so as a course. Ranhofer does not specify the serving temperature; leftovers are commonly pressed, chilled and sliced.

A Little History

Tête de veau is a long-established dish of French bourgeois cookery, and Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchens in New York for more than thirty years before publishing The Epicurean in 1894, treats it as a matter of course: this is No. 1519, and No. 1518 is the same head done en tortue, with the turtle-style garnish of mushrooms, olives, gherkins and quenelles. The au naturel version is the plainer of the two — the head simply poached in a blanc and sent out on a folded napkin with vinaigrette and pickles alongside. Its persistence says something about the period's economics as well as its taste: a head was cheap, it fed a table, and the willingness to serve ear, eye and snout arranged decoratively on a napkin reflects a kitchen culture in which nothing from the animal was hidden. In England the dish carried a political charge, the Calf's Head Club of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries having reputedly dined on it each January to mark the execution of Charles I, though most of what is written about that club comes from hostile pamphleteers rather than its members.