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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CALF'S BRAINS (a la Francaise)
Fry eighteen button onions to a light brown in butter, stir in a table-spoonful of flour, and then add equal quantities of broth and French red wine, a quarter of a pint or more of each, put in a little salt and pepper, and simmer half an hour. Put the brains into this, remembering first to wash and skin them; previous to which they should have been boiled for ten minutes in salted water mixed with a tea-spoonful of vinegar, and laid in cold water until wanted. Add a dozen small mushrooms, and simmer eight or ten minutes until they are done. Serve with the sauce, and garnish with the onions and mushrooms. Time to boil the sauce, half an hour.
This is a workable French braise on paper, but the central ingredient carries a risk that cooking does not remove. The notes below explain why the dish cannot be made as written, and clarify the period vocabulary for readers reading it as a document.
- Why the caution standsBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The infectious agent is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium: it is not destroyed by simmering, by the ten-minute pre-boil, or by any temperature reachable in a domestic kitchen.
- It is also not purchasableIt is also restricted -- In the UK, the EU and many other jurisdictions, brain and spinal tissue from cattle above a specified age (12 months, for the skull and brain) was designated specified risk material and banned from the human food chain following the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Supply is restricted and many butchers will not handle it, though the ban is not absolute everywhere.
- Substitution is not the answer hereSwapping in another offal changes the dish entirely rather than modernising it, and the surrounding braise gives no useful guidance on timings for anything else. If you want a red-wine braise with button onions and mushrooms, work from a current recipe for one.
- "French red wine"This would be an ordinary dry table wine of the claret type rather than a fortified or sweetened one. A quarter of an imperial pint is five fluid ounces, a little over half a US cup.
- Button onionsThese are small whole pickling or pearl onions, roughly an inch across, browned whole in butter and left intact as a garnish. Modern frozen pearl onions are the nearest equivalent in size.
- The structure of the sauceOnions browned in butter, a spoonful of flour stirred in, then equal parts stock and wine simmered half an hour is a plain brown roux-based braising sauce of the period. The technique is sound and long outlived this particular application.
Calf's brains were standard butcher's meat across nineteenth-century Europe and appear in Cassell's alongside sweetbreads, tripe, kidneys and palates as a matter of course, in an era when nothing from a carcass was wasted and offal was cheaper than muscle meat. The a la francaise tag here signals the red-wine-and-button-onion treatment that English cookery writers borrowed from French practice and applied to almost anything braisable; the more famous French handling of the same ingredient is cervelles au beurre noir, brains poached and finished in browned butter with capers. The vinegar in the blanching water and the immediate plunge into cold water are the classic preliminaries, meant to firm the very soft tissue and keep it pale enough to skin cleanly. The dish held its place in British and American cookbooks well into the twentieth century and disappeared from them almost entirely after the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s led to bovine brain and spinal cord being removed from the food supply.