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Calf's Head, Fribourgoise
Prepare and cook a calf's head and dress on a dish, the tongue excepted. Place in a saucepan two gills demi-glace, a half gill white wine, six sliced vinegar pickles, a tablespoon capers, the tongue cut into small squares, half teaspoon chopped chives and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well and let boil ten minutes, pour sauce over calf's head and serve.
A short sauce recipe that assumes the hard part — poaching a whole calf's head — is already done and that a saucepan of demi-glace is standing by. Both assumptions need unpacking before this becomes a dish you can put on a table.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of demi-glace is one cup and a half gill of white wine is a quarter cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the cayenne an eighth of a teaspoon — assertive, but not scorching, in a cup of sauce.
- "Prepare and cook a calf's head"The omitted step is the long one: the split head is soaked in cold water to draw the blood, blanched, then simmered two to three hours, often in a blanc of water, flour, lemon and salt to keep the skin pale. The tongue is usually cooked with it and skinned while hot.
- Sourcing the headCalf's head is a special order from a halal or old-school butcher, and it will normally arrive with the brain and spinal material removed; note that under specified-risk-material rules the skull and brain are controlled for bovines over twelve months in the EU and UK and over thirty months in the US, so for a young calf this is largely butcher practice rather than a blanket legal requirement. Rolled, boned calf's head is also sold and slices neatly.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock combined with espagnole; in a professional kitchen of this period it would ordinarily have been kept on hand. A good jarred or frozen demi-glace works; a thin commercial "brown sauce" does not, and the sauce will taste watery.
- "Vinegar pickles"Sour gherkins or cornichons, not sweet pickles. Six sliced cornichons plus a tablespoon of capers is what carries the dish: the acid cuts the gelatinous richness of the head, and sweet pickle collapses the whole balance.
- The ten-minute boilTen minutes at a boil is for the demi-glace and wine to marry and lose the raw alcohol. Add the diced tongue near the end and the chives off the heat — the tongue is already cooked and long boiling turns it grainy, while chives go grey and lose their point.
- Yield and serviceAbout a cup and a quarter of liquid, plus the pickles, capers and tongue, for a head serving perhaps six to eight. Serve everything very hot on a warmed platter; calf's head is heavily gelatinous and sets to a tacky film the moment it cools.
Calf's head was a staple of nineteenth-century cookery on both sides of the Atlantic — cheap, gelatinous, and endlessly variable according to the sauce poured over it, from the vinaigrette of the French tête de veau ravigote to the turtle-soup impersonation of English mock turtle. "Fribourgoise" points at Fribourg in Switzerland, though in the grand-restaurant idiom of the period such geographic garnish names were often a chef's shorthand for a style rather than a documented regional dish; here it signals the sharp pickle-and-caper finish over a brown sauce. The book it comes from was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects a professional kitchen's habits: a cup of demi-glace is treated as an ingredient you simply have, and the four hours of soaking, blanching and simmering behind "prepare and cook a calf's head" go unmentioned because everyone in that kitchen already knew them.