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 (en Matelote)
Wash the brains in several waters, remove the skin, and boil them in salt and water, with a little vinegar in it, for ten minutes. Take them out and lay them in cold water until they are wanted. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a saucepan, let it melt, mix smoothly with it a tea-spoonful of flour. Put to this three small onions sliced, then add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a clove, a bay-leaf, half a pint of stock, and a glass of white wine. When these are mixed thoroughly together, put the brains with them, and let them stew gently until they are done. Time to stew, a quarter of an hour. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is a nineteenth-century preparation of a cut that is now restricted or prohibited in much of the world. The notes below explain why it cannot be reproduced, along with what the vocabulary of the original would have meant to its first readers.
- Why this dish fails todayBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials: they are the tissues in which the BSE prion concentrates. Cooking does not destroy prions, which survive ordinary boiling, stewing and even autoclaving at temperatures no kitchen can reach. There is no preparation, soaking or blanching step that renders the tissue safe.
- Calf is not a lesser riskAge reduces but does not eliminate the concern, and regulatory limits on the age of cattle whose brain tissue may enter the food chain vary by country. In the EU, UK and US, bovine brain from animals over specified ages is banned from human food outright, and supply is tightly controlled where it is permitted at all.
- Variant CJDThe human disease associated with BSE exposure is variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It has a long and unpredictable incubation period, no diagnostic test that would help before symptoms appear, no treatment, and is invariably fatal. That risk profile is why the caution here is absolute rather than a matter of careful sourcing.
- If you want the dishCook a current recipe from a current source. Any modern treatment of offal will address sourcing and legality for your country, and there is no shortage of matelote preparations that use fish, which is what the term originally described.
- "En matelote" explainedA matelote is a stew built on wine, onions and a roux, traditionally applied to freshwater fish. The name here signals the sauce method, not the main ingredient.
- Reading the measurementsHalf a pint is 10 fluid ounces in British measure, about 285 ml. "A piece of butter the size of a large egg" is roughly 2 oz or 55 g. "A glass of white wine" is an imprecise period measure; wineglass equivalents in nineteenth-century tables are usually given as around 2 fl oz, though usage varied. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not the tomato condiment.
Brains were eaten in nineteenth-century British households and were generally regarded as delicate rather than daring, treated much as other offal was: blanched, cooled, then finished in a made sauce. The matelote sauce itself belongs to French river cookery, where boatmen's stews of eel and carp in red or white wine gave the preparation its name, from matelot, a sailor. Its migration onto offal in English books shows how thoroughly French sauce vocabulary had entered the Victorian middle-class kitchen by the 1870s, when a housekeeper was expected to recognise a bay leaf, a clove and a glass of wine as a system rather than a list. The dish disappeared from British and American tables not through changing taste alone but through regulation, following the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in the mid-1980s and the specified risk material controls that followed in the 1990s.