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.
Brains
Hath a calf, which is the emblem of stupidity, brains? It is one of the glories of cookery that it recognises good in everything-good even in a calf's organ of intelligence. It is only the cerebral matter of calves that is deemed worthy of being shaped into lordly dishes. They are first picked clean, then cooled for at least an hour. Brandade They are then either to be boiled or fried. If boiled (this is the favourite way), they are to be simmered for thirty minutes in water with salt and vinegar, then drained, and they are to be served with Maître d'Hôtel sauce, with black butter, or with Montpellier butter. If fried, they are to be first parboiled for ten minutes in water, salt and vinegar, and they are to be served with Ravigote butter.
This is a straightforward piece of nineteenth-century French offal cookery, but the main ingredient is one of the few foods that has been removed from legal sale in much of the world since it was written.
- Why this cannot be madeWhy this is hard to obtain -- Bovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they are the tissues that can carry the infectious agent of BSE and its human form, variant CJD. In the UK and EU the skull and brain of cattle over 12 months old are excluded from the food chain; in the US, brain from cattle aged 30 months and over is banned. Brain from younger calves is not caught by those thresholds everywhere, and cervelle de veau is still sold in parts of Europe, but it is difficult to source at retail in Britain and the US.
- Cooking does not helpThe agent is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. Thirty minutes at a simmer, or any domestic frying, has no effect on its infectivity, so the usual reassurance that heat makes offal safe does not apply here.
- Not a general ban on offalIf the appeal is the soft, custard-like texture the dish is built around, use a current recipe for a permitted variety meat from a licensed butcher. Nothing in this page should be treated as a working method.
- "Brandade" in the middle of the textThe stray word is most likely a running head or catchword from the printed page that has been swept into the paragraph during transcription. It appears to belong to a neighbouring entry rather than to this one, and the recipe itself contains no salt-cod preparation.
- The sauces namedMaître d'hôtel is butter worked with parsley and lemon; black butter (beurre noir) is butter cooked to a dark nut brown and sharpened with vinegar; Montpellier and ravigote butters are compound butters pounded with green herbs, and in Montpellier's case anchovy and egg yolk as well. All four are worth knowing for other purposes.
- "Picked clean" and "cooled"The two preliminary steps describe removing the surrounding membrane and blood vessels, then letting the tissue cool and firm; the text says only "cooled", though soaking in cold water is the usual way of doing it. This is standard practice for any brain or sweetbread, and the vinegar in the poaching liquid whitens and firms as well as flavours.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written by the journalist and critic E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner, the Soho restaurateur whose kitchen it celebrates; it is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary rather than a sequence of menus, which is why an entry on brains opens with a joke about the proverbial stupidity of the calf. Cervelle de veau was a fixture of French restaurant cooking of the period, valued for a texture no other cut offers and almost always served with a sharp or herbal butter to cut its richness. The entry also shows the Victorian conviction, stated outright here, that good cookery wastes nothing. The specific concern that now keeps this dish off the table, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was not identified until 1986, more than a century after Dallas wrote.