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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Cale's Head Vinaigrette
Have a large hot dish with a folded napkin over it. Dress the ears, one at each end of the dish, then place the pieces in the centre, one over-lapping another. Cut the tongue into six equal pieces, crosswise, and arrange on the sides of the dish; place the brain in the centre of the crown, decorate with parsley greens all around and serve with a vinaigrette sauce in a saucebowl separately.
This is the plating half of a classic calf's head service: the head has already been boned, simmered and cut up before the first line. As written it cannot be recommended, and the reasons are specific rather than squeamish.
- Brain and spinal tissueBovine central nervous system tissue is a specified risk material for BSE, the cattle disease linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. In the United States, the EU and the UK, brain and spinal cord from cattle over a set age are barred from the food supply outright; there is no cooking step that inactivates the prion involved.
- The head itselfA whole calf's head is rare in retail butchery in many countries today, and where head meat is sold the skull and nervous tissue have generally been removed under inspection. A whole head with the brains left in is not something most butchers now supply.
- No cooking stage survives hereThe text begins at the serving dish. The head would have been cooked, boned and cut up before any of this, and the tongue cooked separately. No timings or temperatures are given, so there is nothing here to judge doneness by.
- If you want the sauceVinaigrette in this period usually meant a sharp cold sauce of oil and vinegar with additions such as capers, shallot, parsley and chopped hard-boiled egg, rather than a modern salad dressing. It survives happily alongside tongue, brisket or a boiled beef dish, and a current recipe should be used for anything involving offal.
- The napkinThe recipe lays a folded napkin over the hot dish, with the meat arranged on top; this is a period service convention meant to absorb condensation. It is not a cooking instruction and has no bearing on the food.
Calf's head was one of the great set pieces of nineteenth-century European cookery, valued precisely because it demanded skill: the head was boned whole, the ears kept intact for the two ends of the platter, the tongue cooked apart and sliced, and the brains reserved as the centrepiece of the arrangement. Served hot with vinaigrette or cold as tete de veau, it was standard in French, English and Central European kitchens, and a book with international ambitions would have looked incomplete without it. Mock turtle soup, made from a calf's head to imitate the far costlier green turtle, is the same tradition running in a thriftier direction. The dish largely disappeared from Western tables in the late twentieth century, first because whole heads fell out of domestic fashion and then, decisively, because the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s led regulators to remove bovine brain and spinal cord from the food chain altogether.