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.
Home › The World's Kitchen › How to Cook a Cale's Head
How to Cook a Cale's Head
Plunge a small, fresh, white calf's head into plenty of hot water for one minute; take it up, sharply and carefully rub it all over with a coarse towel so as to remove all remaining hairs; scrape both ears, then with a sharp knife carefully cut the flesh, starting from the centre of the head right down to the nostrils. Then bone it from top to base on both sides; remove the tongue, place the meat with the tongue in a saucepan with two quarts cold water and boil for five minutes. Drain and let cool. Trim off the white skin from the tongue and cheeks and cut the meat into twelve as nearly equal pieces as possible. Have in a stewpan two ounces flour, three pints cold water, one gill vinegar, half bunch parsley, two carrots cut in quarters, and one sliced white onion. Mix well with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Season with a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan and slowly boil for two hours. Remove from the fire, lift up the pieces and drain on a cloth. Crack the frontal bone of the head open, carefully remove the brain and place it in cold water for five minutes; lift it up, and neatly remove all the skin, etc., adhering to it. Have a pint boiling water with a teaspoon salt and half gill vinegar in a saucepan; drop in the brain and boil for ten minutes; drain well and use as directed.
This is a butchery-and-blanching procedure rather than a finished dish, and it cannot be carried out today. The reasons are specific to the tissues it asks for.
- Brain and spinal tissueThe recipe's final step is the removal and poaching of the calf's brain. Brain, skull contents and spinal cord are the cattle tissues that carry the infectious prion of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, linked in humans to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is invariably fatal; from animals above the regulatory age thresholds these tissues are classed as specified risk material.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not living organisms and are not inactivated by any domestic process. The ten minutes of boiling in salted, acidulated water called for here reduces nothing; neither would longer boiling, roasting, or pressure cooking. There is no time or temperature that makes this step safe.
- The head itselfSplitting the skull is also the step that spreads the risk. Cracking the frontal bone scatters nervous tissue over the muscle meat, the tongue and the work surface, so the cheeks and tongue that the earlier part of the recipe carefully trims cannot be treated as unaffected once the head is opened.
- You cannot buy the materialSince the SRM controls introduced in Europe from the late 1990s and in North America after 2003, bovine skulls with brain in place from animals above the regulatory age thresholds are removed at the abattoir and destroyed rather than sold. Calves may fall below those thresholds and veal brains are still sold in some countries, so local rules vary; availability does not settle whether it is a good idea.
- Boned cheek and tonguePrepared calf's cheek and tongue are still sold in some markets, already separated from the skull under inspection. If you want to cook them, follow a current recipe with modern handling and temperatures rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the originalFor what it is worth as a historical document: a gill is half a cup, so the vinegar in the poaching liquor is half a cup and the acidulated brain water a quarter cup. The "stewpan" is a wide, straight-sided saucepan, and the flour-and-water mixture is a blanc, a white cooking liquor used to keep pale offal from discolouring.
Calf's head was one of the great set pieces of nineteenth-century catering, valued precisely because it took skill: the flesh, ears, tongue and brain all cook differently, and a cook who could bring them to table together in a clean white sauce was worth paying. It supplied the gelatinous body of mock turtle soup, the English substitute for real turtle, and in France tête de veau was served warm with vinaigrette or sauce ravigote. The acid in the cooking liquor and in the brain water belongs to that tradition, used both to season and to keep the meat white. The International Cook Book (1906) is Alexander Filippini's, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it is written for cooks expected to butcher as well as cook, which is why the instructions begin with scalding and scraping hairs rather than with a pan. That whole economy of the head vanished twice over: first as home butchery gave way to portioned retail cuts, and then decisively in the 1990s, when BSE made the skull and its contents a regulated waste product rather than a delicacy.