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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VEAL--CALF'S BRAINS (a la Ravigote)
Wash the brains in several waters, and free them from skin and fibre. Boil them for ten minutes in salt and water mixed with a table-spoonful of vinegar, and when they are firm, cut them into slices, dip these in a frying-batter, and fry them to a light brown. Place them in a circle on a hot dish with a little fried parsley in the centre, and send ravigote sauce to table with them. Time to fry the brains, four or five minutes. Calf's brains are generally sold with the head. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is a straightforward fritter of poached and battered brains, but the central ingredient is one that modern food safety has ruled out. The notes below explain the specific hazard and the points of period vocabulary.
- Why this dish is off the tableBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials: they are the tissues that carry the highest infective load of the BSE prion. Prions are not destroyed by the ten-minute boil, by frying, or by any domestic cooking temperature.
- The disease itselfVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human illness linked to eating BSE-contaminated tissue, has an incubation period that can run to decades and no treatment or cure. From the late 1980s onward -- the UK's specified bovine offal ban dates from 1989, with EU-wide specified risk material controls following in the later 1990s -- brain and spinal cord from cattle over a set age have been excluded from the human food chain in the UK, the EU and many other jurisdictions.
- Age is not a loopholeThe recipe calls for calf's brains rather than beef, and young animals do carry lower risk, but the regulatory picture varies by country: in the EU the skull and brain are classed as specified risk material only in cattle over twelve months, so brains from younger calves remain legal in some jurisdictions and restricted in others. This is not a judgement a home cook should be making at the butcher's counter.
- "Sold with the head"The closing line reflects a trade in whole calves' heads that has largely disappeared from British and American butchery. If you want a ravigote-sauced fritter, use a current recipe with a different filling.
- Ravigote sauceThe sauce itself is entirely sound and worth knowing: in the cold form, a vinaigrette sharpened with capers, shallot and chopped tarragon, chervil and parsley; in the hot form, a velouté finished with the same herbs and a little vinegar. It suits poached chicken, calf's tongue, boiled leeks or a firm white fish.
- Fried parsleyThe garnish in the centre of the ring is parsley dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until it stops sputtering and turns brittle and vivid green. It burns almost immediately after that, and it must be bone dry going in.
Cervelles de veau were standard nineteenth-century offal cookery on both sides of the Channel, ranked with sweetbreads as a delicate, mild-flavoured item suited to invalids and to elaborate garnishes; the treatment here—wash, firm in acidulated water, slice, batter, fry—is the classic French handling. Ravigote takes its name from the French ravigoter, to revive or perk up, a reference to the sharpness of the vinegar and the fresh herbs, and it was the conventional partner for boiled and poached meats that needed lifting. The entry sits among a systematic run of veal cuts. The dish survived in restaurant cooking well into the twentieth century, and the BSE controls of the 1990s restricted the ingredient rather than removing the recipe from the books.