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, Matelote Of
Take eight unbroken sheep's brains. Put them into a large vessel with some lukewarm water; take off the skin, and let them disgorge for two hours. When they are become quite white, blanch them in boiling water, vinegar, and salt; and when they are very firm put them in cold water, after which place some layers of bacon round a stewpan big enough to hold all the eight brains; add a small onion with one clove, a small bundle of parsley well-seasoned, and some salt, and cover with slices of bacon and a round of paper; a little broth is required, and a few slices of lemon to keep the brains very white. Twenty minutes will suffice to boil them, but they must be boiled two hours or more before dinner to acquire a flavour; then at dinner you must have ready some croutons, or small crusts of bread, in quantity equal to the brains, stick them in the dish alternately to leave room to put the brains in the spaces; mask them with the matelote sauce, mushrooms, and small onions, etc. This matelote is the same sauce as the financiere, only reduce a little Madeira wine in a small stewpan, and put in it a mushroom, a small glazed onion, a small quenelle, etc., and put the ragout into the middle, and the sauce over the brains.
This is a set-piece from the age of the grand French kitchen, and it cannot be reproduced. The problem is not technique but the main ingredient itself.
- Why the brains are the problemBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents concentrate. In sheep the relevant disease is scrapie; the same class of agent in cattle is BSE, which is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, a fatal condition with no treatment.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not conventional pathogens. They are misfolded proteins that survive boiling, roasting, ordinary autoclaving and most disinfectants, so nothing in the twenty-minute simmer or the two-hour rest described here reduces the hazard.
- It is not simply a matter of sourcingOvine skull, brain and spinal cord from animals above a specified age (over twelve months in the UK and EU) are classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain; comparable restrictions apply in some other countries. Brains from younger lambs may still be sold legally in places, but eight sets are neither an easy nor an advisable purchase for a home cook.
- The blanching step is cosmetic, not sanitaryThe soaking, skinning and blanching in vinegar and salt are there to firm the tissue and keep it white for presentation. They were never a safety measure and should not be read as one.
- The sauce, for referenceMatelote here is, as the recipe itself states, the same sauce as financière, with Madeira reduced into it and a garnish of mushrooms, small glazed onions and quenelles. That garnish, and the ring of croutons, belong to a whole family of Victorian entrées and can be met in dishes built on ingredients that are still eaten.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a different braised offal or a quenelle entrée in the same style. No adaptation of this one is offered.
Brains were a standard restaurant and household entrée across nineteenth-century Europe, prized for a texture nothing else supplied: soft, faintly rich, and neutral enough to carry an elaborate sauce. The vocabulary is that of the professional French kitchen — matelote, financière, quenelles, glazed onions, the bacon-lined stewpan and the round of paper — scaled for a large household table. The instruction to cook the brains hours before dinner and let them sit reflects the recipe's own claim that they thereby 'acquire a flavour'. The dish faded from British cooking through the twentieth century, and the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s brought legal controls on brain and spinal tissue that effectively finished it off in Britain, though brains remain in use in some other European cuisines.