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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Scalloped Calf's Head
Clean the head, remove the brains, and set in a cool place. Boil the head until the meat slips easily from the bones. Take it out and chop fine, season with herbs, pepper and salt; then put in layers into a buttered pudding dish with bits of butter between each layer. Moisten well with liquor in which the head was boiled. Wash the brains very thoroughly, removing all the membrane. Beat them into a smooth paste, season with pepper and salt, and stir into them two eggs beaten very light. Spread this evenly over the scallop, dredge the top with a little flour, and bake to a delicate brown. Half an hour will be long enough.
This is a dish that has been overtaken by events. The problem is not the technique but the material: bovine central nervous tissue, which is now classed as specified risk material and excluded from the human food chain in most countries.
- The brains are the hinge, and the reason to stopBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE prion concentrates. Prions are not destroyed by boiling, baking, or any temperature a kitchen can reach; the half hour in the oven that browns the topping does nothing to them. There is no preparation of this topping that makes it safe.
- Why the head itself is also restrictedRegulations in the UK, EU and elsewhere designate the skull, brain and spinal cord of cattle above set age thresholds as specified risk material that must be removed at slaughter and destroyed. Below those thresholds the rules differ, but in practice heads are commonly sold split and cleaned, and brains are difficult to obtain from a licensed butcher in those jurisdictions.
- The trimmings are not a substituteCheek and tongue meat from young cattle remains an ordinary butcher's item, but a dish built from them is a different recipe with a different name. If you want head cheese, brawn or a scalloped tongue, work from a current recipe with current sourcing rather than adapting this one.
- "Liquor" here means brothNineteenth-century meat cookery uses liquor for the cooking liquid, not for spirits. The instruction to moisten with the liquor in which the head was boiled is asking for the gelatinous stock the head has thrown off.
- "Pudding dish" is a baking dishIn this period a pudding dish is a deep, straight-sided earthenware or enamel dish, roughly what would now be called a casserole. The finished thing is a layered baked dish, not a scallop shell preparation.
- "Bake to a delicate brown"The phrase describes a pale gold surface rather than a crust. The recipe gives no oven setting, only the half-hour timing. It is recorded here only to explain the original text.
Calf's head was a staple of thrifty nineteenth-century meat cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, and cookbooks of the period often carry several treatments of it: boiled with brain sauce, turtle-style in mock turtle soup, hashed, and scalloped as here. A head yielded gelatinous cheek meat, tongue, and the brains, and the point of a household manual like this one was to show a cook how to turn an inexpensive purchase into several meals. The brain-and-egg topping belongs to an older technique in which beaten brains acted as a thickener and enricher, much as egg yolk would elsewhere. The dish faded from ordinary cooking over the twentieth century as butchery moved out of the home and away from whole carcass buying, and the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, followed by regulations excluding bovine nervous tissue from the food supply, closed the door on it.