Brain Sauce
Take a calf's brains, clean, and soak an hour in cold water. Remove the outer skin, and put them in a stewpan with enough cold water to nearly cover them; add a tablespoonful of lemon juice or vinegar and half a teaspoonful of salt, and simmer fifteen minutes; then skim them out and plunge in cold water for a few minutes. Drain, and chop them fine.
Have a pint of white sauce or drawn butter, season it with lemon juice and finely minced parsley and 1/2 teaspoonful of kitchen bouquet; add the chopped brains, and as soon as thoroughly hot, serve.
Serve with boiled calf's head or any dish that calls for a meat sauce.
A late-Victorian meat sauce built on poached calf's brains folded into a white sauce. The technique is sound; most of what needs translating is vocabulary and sourcing.
- Sourcing the brainsBovine brain is classed as specified risk material in most jurisdictions because of BSE, and in the EU the skull and brain of cattle over twelve months old may not enter the food chain at all. In the United States brain from animals under thirty months is still legal but rarely stocked; buy only from a licensed butcher who can name the age of the animal, and skip the dish entirely if that assurance is not available.
- The hinge: the membraneEverything depends on stripping the fine outer membrane and the threads of blood vessel after the cold soak. Work under a trickle of cold water with your fingertips rather than a knife. Any membrane left behind tightens in the poaching liquid and gives the finished sauce a stringy, slightly bitter edge.
- Acidulated poachThe lemon juice or vinegar is not for flavour but to keep the brains pale and firm. Fifteen minutes at a bare shiver is right for a set of calf's brains; a rolling boil breaks them up before you ever get to chop them.
- Drawn butterIn American books of this period drawn butter means a light flour-thickened butter sauce, not the clarified butter served with shellfish today. Period versions use a good deal of butter with only a spoonful or two of flour, let down with hot water; the recipe's alternative, white sauce, is the flour-and-milk version.
- A pintA US pint here, so 2 cups of sauce. The recipe gives no yield; it is served as a sauce with boiled calf's head or, as the text says, any dish that calls for a meat sauce.
- Kitchen bouquetA commercial browning and seasoning liquid, caramel-based, still sold under the same name. Half a teaspoon is there to warm the colour of a very pale sauce; a few drops of soy or a spoonful of concentrated veal glaze does the same job.
- Finishing heatOnce the chopped brains go in, bring the sauce only to steaming. Held at a simmer they curdle into grains and the sauce turns granular rather than smooth.
Brains were standard butcher's-shop goods in the nineteenth century, sold cheaply among the offal and cooked in every direction: crumbed and fried, scrambled with eggs, made into fritters, or, as here, chopped into a white sauce to sauce something else. The pairing with boiled calf's head points to the older tradition behind it — a boiled head was a set piece of English and American family cookery, and period cookbooks often direct that the brains be cooked separately and returned to the table as their own dressing. Sauces of this kind, meat folded into a flour-thickened white sauce, take up substantial space in the sauce chapters of compilations of the era. The dish has largely disappeared from Anglo-American kitchens, in part through changing taste and in part through regulation: BSE controls introduced from the late 1980s onward removed bovine brain from most retail counters.