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To Dress a Calf's Head, One Half Boiled, and the Other Baked

A calf's head is half boiled, half baked, seasoned with egg yolk, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

To Dress a Calf's Head, One Half Boiled, and the Other Baked

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the calf's head thoroughly.

  2. Parboil one half of the head.

  3. Boil the other half in a cloth until cooked.

Bake the half

  1. Beat the egg yolk.

  2. Rub it over the parboiled head with a feather.

  3. Sprinkle pepper, coarse sea salt, thyme, chopped parsley, shredded lemon peel, grated bread, and a little nutmeg over it.

  4. Dot the head with bits of butter.

  5. Place it in the oven.

Serve

  1. Serve both halves together on a dish.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's head
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked in two different ways for contrasting textures.
Egg yolk
Brushed on as a glaze that helps the crust set and brown in the oven.
Grated bread
Forms a crumb topping that crisps and browns in the oven.
Butter
Dotted over the top to add fat, which enriches the crust and promotes browning.

The step that matters

Parboiling the first half. Parboiling only partly cooks the head, so it must be timed carefully. Too short leaves it raw inside, and too long leaves it dry and tough before it reaches the oven.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, thyme, parsley, lemon, bread, butter):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, thyme, parsley, lemon, bread, butter. 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.

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