Skip to main content
Main

Hashed Calf’s-head in St. James’s Place

A dish of boiled calf's head, brains, and buttered flour sauce, seasoned with wine, ketchup, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hashed Calf’s-head in St. James’s Place

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the head

  1. Boil the calf's head in water until tender enough to remove the hair.

  2. Remove the head and blanch it in cold water.

  3. Slice the neck from the bone.

Make the sauce

  1. Brown the butter in a pan.

  2. Dust the butter with flour.

  3. Add the soup.

  4. Place the head in the pan and stew over low heat.

  5. Stir in the ketchup and white wine.

  6. Add lemon juice after removing from heat.

Make the brain fritters

  1. Blanch the brains.

  2. Combine the brains in a saucepan with wine, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and grated bread.

  3. Beat in the egg.

  4. Fry the mixture in beef or mutton dripping until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Calf's head
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through boiling and stewing.
Butter
Browned to add rich, nutty flavour and fat to the base of the sauce.
Flour
Dusted into the browned butter to thicken the sauce.
Egg
Binds the brain mixture so it holds together when fried.
Brains
Form the base of the fritter mixture, giving a soft, rich texture.
Grated bread
Adds body to the brain mixture and helps it hold its shape.

The step that matters

Add lemon juice after removing from heat. Acid added to a hot, long-cooked sauce can curdle or dull its texture and flavour, so it is added off the heat.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, ketchup, white wine, lemon, wine, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, ketchup, white wine, lemon, wine, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes