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 Maitre d'Hotel)
Remove the skin and the fibres from two lots of calves' brains. Wash them several times in cold water, then place them in boiling water, adding a table-spoonful of vinegar, a little salt, and a small piece of butter. Let them boil for about half an hour, then remove and divide them. Cut some thin slices of stale bread into rounds, fry them in boiling butter or oil, place the brains on the bread, and pour over the whole maitre d'hotel sauce. Probable cost of the calf's head (the brain is not sold without), 5s. to 9s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
This entry is here as a historical document rather than a set of instructions. The reason is the main ingredient, not the technique.
- Why the dish fails nowBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the cattle disease linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The agent is a misfolded prion, not a microbe; the half-hour boil in this recipe destroys nothing, since prions survive ordinary cooking, and there is no treatment for the resulting illness.
- It is also largely illegalIt is also restricted -- since the BSE controls of the 1990s, the skull and spinal cord of cattle over a set age (twelve months in the UK and EU) have been classed as specified risk material and are removed and destroyed at the abattoir. Brains from younger calves are not caught by that particular threshold everywhere, but the rules vary by country and the domestic trade has largely vanished.
- "Two lots"Most likely two sets of brains, i.e. from two calves' heads. The note that the brain "is not sold without" reflects a trade in which the head was sold entire.
- The price5s. to 9s. is five to nine shillings, a quarter to nearly half a pound sterling. The figure quoted is for the whole head, not for the brains alone, and the recipe notes the brain was not sold separately.
- Maitre d'hotel sauceIn Cassell's usage this is not the compound butter of modern menus but a light sauce of melted butter or thin white sauce with chopped parsley, lemon juice and seasoning. It is worth knowing for other entries in the book, where it dresses fish and vegetables.
- If you want the shape of the dishFried bread rounds under a soft poached filling with a parsley-and-lemon butter is a template that works with plenty of current ingredients. Use a modern recipe for whatever you put on the croutons; do not adapt this one.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century kitchen economy: a calf's head was among the cheapest large purchases in the butcher's shop, and cookery dictionaries of the period devote whole runs of entries to its parts, from the cheek and tongue down to the brains and the gelatinous skin used for mock turtle soup. The French dressing here, a la maitre d'hotel, roughly "in the steward's manner", signalled the plain butter-parsley-lemon finish that Anglo-French kitchens applied to delicate boiled things, and its presence in a British household dictionary shows how thoroughly French terminology had entered the middle-class repertoire. The dish kept a place in British and American cooking well into the twentieth century; its disappearance owed a good deal to the BSE epidemic and the controls on specified risk material that followed, though brain dishes had already been in decline before that.