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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Bullock's Brains with Tomato Sauce
Stew the brains as directed in the preceding recipe, and when quite ready to serve, cover with tomato sauce.
This is a two-line finishing note rather than a full recipe, and it depends on a preceding entry for the stewing. It cannot be prepared safely today, for reasons specific to the cut rather than the method.
- Why this one failsBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The infectious agent is a prion, not a bacterium, and it is not destroyed by stewing, boiling, or any temperature a domestic kitchen reaches. There is no cooking time or temperature that makes this dish safe.
- It is also not soldIn the United Kingdom, the European Union and many other jurisdictions, cattle brain and spinal tissue have been excluded from the human food chain by the BSE controls that began in 1989. The rules are tied to the age of the animal, but in practice a butcher will not supply it, so the recipe is a dead letter as well as a hazard.
- The other bovine offal in the bookCassell's carries brains in the same run of entries as sweetbreads, tripe and tongue. They are not interchangeable now: thymus, tripe and tongue remain ordinary butcher's goods, while brain does not. If you want something like the texture the recipe is aiming at, a current sweetbread recipe is the thing to follow.
- "Bullock"A bullock is a castrated male bovine, in period usage simply beef cattle. The term signals an adult animal rather than a calf, and it is adult cattle at which the BSE tissue controls are chiefly aimed.
- The cross-reference"Stew the brains as directed in the preceding recipe" points to a separate entry in the same section; the page as printed contains no method of its own. Nothing here is missing by accident, but nothing here is usable either.
- The tomato sauceThe only part worth salvaging is the accompaniment. Victorian tomato sauces of this kind are generally cooked and sieved purees, often built on stock and lightly thickened, closer to a thin coulis than to a modern pasta sauce, and such a sauce suits sweetbreads, brawn or grilled offal perfectly well.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century household food across Europe, valued for a soft, almost custard-like texture that took strongly flavoured sauces well; French cookery had a long repertoire of cervelles served with black butter, in fritters, or blanketed in a sauce. Tomato sauce was still comparatively unfamiliar in many British kitchens when this dictionary was compiled -- tomatoes moved from hothouse curiosity to common vegetable over the second half of the century -- although recipes for it had appeared in English cookery books well before then. The chain of one-line recipes, each referring back to the last, is characteristic of the dictionary format: the method is given once and then varied by sauce. The dish vanished from British cooking through a combination of declining appetite for offal and, decisively, regulation, after BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986 and controls on specified bovine tissues followed at the end of that decade.