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.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › SHEEP'S BRAINS (en Matelote)
SHEEP'S BRAINS (en Matelote)
Prepare the brains as for SHEEP'S BRAINS, A LA MAITRE D'HOTEL, almost the only difference being in the sauce poured upon them, which is thus made. Put two ounces of butter into a stewpan. When it has done boiling, stir into it half a table-spoonful of flour. Stir the butter and flour till smooth, and let it fry gently until it has acquired a rich brown colour, of reddish hue. Next add by degrees a pint of white wine (Madeira or sherry), and half a pint of well-flavoured and rich broth, but without any fat. Put in also a bunch of herbs so tied up that it may easily be taken out before the sauce is used. This bunch is to consist of parsley, green onions, half a bay-leaf, a very small bit of thyme, and a clove of garlic. Let the sauce reduce; then throw in a few morels, small mushrooms, and small bleached onions. Season with salt, black pepper, and cayenne. When the sauce is on the point of being done, put into it a couple of ounces of truffles cut into slices and fried on both sides in butter. Let the sauce boil up again, and it is ready. Arrange the brains in the dish with sippets of toast, garnish with forcemeat balls, and with some crayfish; then pour the sauce over them, and serve up immediately.
This is a nineteenth-century garnish-and-sauce dish built on an offal that is now restricted or banned for sale in most of the West. The sauce is conventional; the main ingredient is the problem.
- Why the brains rule this outBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathies concentrate. Sheep and goats carry scrapie, and the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s showed that a bovine TSE could cross to humans as variant CJD, which is untreatable and fatal.
- Cooking does not helpThe infectious agent is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium or virus. It survives ordinary cooking, prolonged boiling, and even standard autoclaving, so no time or temperature in a domestic kitchen renders such tissue safe.
- It is not simply a matter of choiceSpecified risk material rules in the EU, the UK and elsewhere require brain and spinal cord from sheep and goats over a set age, and from cattle over the relevant age, to be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. That puts most such tissue beyond the reach of a modern butcher, though brains from animals below the age threshold are not everywhere classed as specified risk material and may still be sold in some places.
- Cross-contaminationHandling and trimming this kind of tissue at home is hard to contain on boards, knives and in the sink. Specified risk material is removed at the abattoir rather than the shop in order to keep it out of the food chain altogether.
- What to do insteadIf the matelote sauce is what appeals, work from a current recipe for a red- or white-wine matelote over fish or poultry. We are not going to supply an adapted version of this one.
- Reading the originalA matelote is a wine stew, originally of freshwater fish, and the name comes from matelot, sailor. Sippets are small triangles or fingers of toasted bread; bleached onions are small onions blanched pale rather than browned; forcemeat balls are seasoned minced-meat dumplings poached or fried.
- Scale of the sauceA pint of Madeira or sherry with only half a pint of broth is a fortified-wine reduction of a richness rarely met today, from a period when sherry was more commonly stocked and comparatively cheaper in Britain than it is now.
Brains had a settled place in the Victorian and Edwardian repertoire as one of the "white" offals, grouped with sweetbreads and calf's head: mild, soft, and prized for a delicacy of texture that the period valued highly. The book gives several treatments in sequence, each varying only the sauce, in the manner of the large dictionary-style cookbooks of the period. En matelote borrows the trappings of the older wine stew of freshwater fish -- the wine reduction, mushrooms, small glazed onions, crayfish and fried sippets -- and applies them to something else entirely. The dish faded from British and American tables with changing taste in offal, and the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s effectively ended the domestic trade in ruminant brain.