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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SHEEP'S BRAINS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Proceed just as in the recipe SHEEP'S BRAINS, MATELOTE OF, with the croutons (crusts) glazed and stuck in the dish; and at dinner-time, as soon as you have dished up the brains, take three spoonfuls of bechamel, a good bit of fresh butter, a little salt and cayenne, some parsley chopped and blanched, and the juice of half a lemon; then work the sauce over the fire to render it very hot, and serve quickly.
SHEEP'S BRAINS (a la Maitre d'Hotel), another way.
Prepare and parboil the brains; then lay them in the bottom of a wide stewpan, each brain resting upon a slice of bacon. Add a small bunch of parsley, a small onion, one clove, some salt, a chilli, a couple of slices of lemon, and a quarter of a pint of broth, and cover the whole with a layer of bacon. Cover the stewpan, and let its contents stew slowly for half an hour without being uncovered. Let the brains now stand a couple of hours in the stewpan by the side of the fire, merely that they may acquire the flavour of the accompanying ingredients; but they must neither boil nor simmer, nor in anywise approach ebullition. Have some triangular slices of bread ready fried to garnish the dish with. Drain the brains from the fat, place them upon a dish with the sippets, and pour over them the following sauce. Into a small stewpan put two ounces of butter; when it boils sprinkle in half a table-spoonful of flour. Stir into this half a pint of broth, and put in with it a bunch of parsley and a very small bit of lemon-peel. When the sauce is reduced and of proper consistency, season it with salt and a little cayenne. Strain the sauce, and put it again into the stewpan, adding a little lemon-juice and some chopped parsley. Give it a few boils, and pour it quite hot over the brains.
This is a working recipe from a professional-style Victorian kitchen, but it belongs to a category of offal cookery that modern food safety has closed off. The notes below explain the specific hazards and decode the period language, not how to reproduce the dish.
- Nervous-system tissue is the problemBrain and spinal cord are the classic specified risk materials for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies — BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and goats. The infectious agent is a misfolded prion, not a microbe: it is not destroyed by stewing, by two hours beside the fire, or by any temperature a domestic kitchen reaches. Variant CJD in humans is untreatable and fatal.
- Sale is restricted, not merely discouragedSince the BSE controls of the 1990s, the skull and brain of older sheep and goats, and of cattle, have been classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain in the UK and EU, with parallel restrictions elsewhere. A butcher in most of Europe cannot legally supply the main ingredient.
- The two-hour warm holdAfter half an hour's slow stewing, the recipe sets the brains and bacon by the side of the fire for two hours with explicit instructions that they must never approach boiling. That is a long spell in the bacterial growth range. Even setting prions aside, this is a holding step no modern kitchen would use with offal.
- The recipe is incomplete on its ownThe first version simply says to proceed as for the matelote of sheep's brains, an entry printed elsewhere in the book. As given here it presumes you have already prepared the brains according to that entry.
- Period vocabularySippets are small triangles or fingers of fried bread, used here as both garnish and sop. A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz in imperial measure, half a pint 10 fl oz. "A chilli" means a single whole pod, added for warmth, not chilli powder.
- Maitre d'hotelThe name signals the sauce, not the meat: butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Here the book builds it out into a thin flour-thickened sauce of butter, flour and broth finished with parsley and lemon.
- If you want the dishCalf's and lamb's brains still appear on European restaurant menus where sourcing and age controls allow it. That is a matter for a current recipe and a licensed supplier, not for this page.
Brains were ordinary eating in nineteenth-century Britain and France, cheap and quick to cook; Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery carries a run of entries for them — matelote, à la maître d'hôtel among them — because a comprehensive household dictionary was expected to cover every part of the carcass a butcher might send. The maître d'hôtel treatment, parsley and lemon worked into butter, was a common way of dressing mild, pale meat or fish, and its appearance here shows the book borrowing directly from French professional practice for a very English cut of offal. The trade in sheep and cattle brains persisted in Britain until the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, after which controls progressively removed such tissue from sale; recipes like this one now read as a record of a food that public-health measures ended within living memory.