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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February 17
Menu: Strained Gumbo; Oyster Souffle; Calf's Head, Vinaigrette; Baked Eggplant; Russian Salad; Coffee; String Beans; Ambrosia Calf's Head, Vinaigrette-Clean and scald 12 a calf's head. Cover with water and boil 12 an hour, then plunge into cold water. When cool, remove meat and cut in small squares. Make a roux of 1 tablespoon Crisco and 2 tablespoons flour cooked thoroughly; add 4 cloves, 3 whole peppers, small onion, carrot, 2 bay leaves, dash of thyme, and 2 tablespoons strong vinegar. Add the meat. Simmer 2 hours; remove into deep dish and cover with vinaigrette sauce, which is made with 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon paprika, dash white pepper mixed with 3 tablespoons tarragon or plain vinegar. Add 6 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon gherkins, and 1 teaspoon each chives and parsley all chopped very fine, and 1 tablespoon minced green pepper. Blend well before pouring over meat. This may be served either hot or cold. Garnish with cucumber pickles cut into fan shapes. Cheese Canapes
This is a period recipe for a dish that cannot be prepared safely today. The notes below explain what the instructions involve and why the head of a calf is no longer a legal or safe cut in most of the world.
- Why the caution appliesA whole or half calf's head carries brain and spinal-cord tissue, the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is invariably fatal and has no treatment. Cooking, scalding and two hours of simmering do not inactivate the prion.
- Not merely a matter of tasteSince the BSE controls of the 1990s and 2000s, brain, skull, spinal cord and associated nervous tissue from cattle over a specified age (12 months in the EU and UK, 30 months in the United States) have been classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain. Animals below that age fall outside those rules, and calf's head is still butchered and sold in some countries, France among them; the head of an older animal, however, could not be sold as it was in 1913.
- The trimmings do not rescue itThe vinaigrette, the gherkins and the fanned cucumber pickles are all sound period garnish work, but they are dressing on the offending ingredient. There is no version of this preparation that removes the hazard, so no adjusted time or temperature is given here. If you want a cold vinaigrette-dressed meat dish, use a current recipe built on a different cut.
- What the original was aiming atThe point of the dish was texture: the gelatinous cheek and skin set into cubes, held in a spiced, vinegar-sharpened liquor, then flooded with a sauce vinaigrette. That effect is what a modern cook would be trying to reproduce, and it does not depend on the head.
- Reading the ingredient list"3 whole peppers" here most likely means three whole peppercorns rather than three pods; "strong vinegar" probably indicates a full-strength, undiluted table vinegar rather than anything concentrated, though the book does not define the term. Crisco stands in for the lard or butter an older roux would have used, and behaves like any neutral solid shortening.
- YieldThe book gives none. The recipe sits in a dated calendar-of-dinners sequence -- the page ends with an entry for February 18 -- but no number of servings is stated.
Calf's head was a cornerstone of nineteenth-century thrift cookery on both sides of the Atlantic: cheap, gelatinous, and endlessly adaptable, it turned up boiled, turtled into mock turtle soup, crumbed and fried, or as here cut in squares and dressed cold with vinaigrette in the French manner tête de veau vinaigrette, a Parisian bistro standby that American cookbooks are often said to have borrowed. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is telling. That book was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could do everything lard and butter did, so its recipe section deliberately ranged across the whole respectable repertoire, from cheese canapés to organ meats, with Crisco quietly substituted at each point where an older book would have said lard. The dish fell out of American cooking well before the BSE controls of the 1990s, and the decline is usually attributed to changing appetites for offal rather than to regulation; the specified risk material rules are age-based, and calf's head remains a legal cut in some jurisdictions.