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, en Matelote
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-6 sheep's brains, vinegar, salt, a few slices of bacon, 1 small onion, 2 cloves, a small bunch of parsley, sufficient stock or weak broth to cover the brains, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, matelote sauce. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Detach the brains from the head, without breaking them, and put them into a pan of warm water; remove the skin, and let them remain for 2 hours. Have ready a saucepan of boiling water, add a little vinegar and salt, and put in the brains.
When they are quite firm, take them out and put them into very cold water. Place 2 or 3 slices of bacon in a stewpan, put in the brains, the onion, stuck with 2 cloves, the parsley, and a good seasoning of pepper and salt; cover with stock or weak broth, and boil them gently for about 25 minutes. Have ready some croûtons; arrange these in the dish alternately with the brains, and cover with a matelote sauce, to which has been added the above proportion of lemon-juice.
TIME.-25 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Sheep's Feet or Trotters. (SOYER'S Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 or 8 persons.-12 feet, 1/4 lb. of beef or mutton suet, 2 onions, 1 carrot, 2 bay- SHEEP'S HEAD. leaves, 2 sprigs of thyme, 1 oz. of salt, 0%. of pepper, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, 2 quarts of water, 1/4 lb. of fresh butter, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of flour, 1/4 teaspoonful of pepper, a little grated nutmeg, the juice of 1 lemon, 1 gill of milk, the yolks of 2 eggs.
AVERAGE COST, 3s.
Have the feet cleaned, and the long bone extracted from them. Put the suet into a stewpan, with the onions and carrot, sliced, the bay-leaves, thyme, salt and pepper, and let these simmer for 5 minutes. Add two tablespoonfuls of flour and the water, and keep stirring till it boils; then put in the feet. Let these simmer for 3 hours, or until perfectly tender, and take them and lay them on a sieve. Mix together on a plate, with the back of a spoon, butter, salt, flour (1 teaspoonful), pepper, nutmeg and lemon-juice, as above, and put the feet, with a gill of milk, into a stewpan. When very hot, add the butter, &c., and stir continually till melted. Now mix the yolks of 2 eggs with 5 tablespoonfuls of milk; stir this to the other ingredients, keep moving the pan over the fire continually for a minute or two, but do not allow it to boil after the eggs are added.
Serve in a very hot dish, and garnish with croûtons or sippets of toasted bread.
TIME.-3 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Two recipes share this page: sheep's brains in matelote and Soyer's sheep's trotters. The first cannot be made today, for reasons that have nothing to do with technique.
- Why the brains are outIn the UK and EU the skull including brain, and the spinal cord, of sheep above a set age are classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food chain under the transmissible spongiform encephalopathy controls introduced from the 1990s. Rules elsewhere differ; US specified risk material restrictions are framed around cattle. Where the restriction applies it is a regulatory matter, and no soaking, blanching or 25-minute simmer inactivates a prion.
- Nothing to substituteThere is no safe home handling procedure for this cut, so no adjusted times or temperatures are given here. If you want the matelote treatment, use a current recipe built around fish or poultry, which is where matelote sauce began in any case.
- What matelote sauce wasBeeton assumes you already have it. It is a red-wine and stock reduction finished with butter, seasoned with mushrooms and small onions; the name comes from matelot, sailor, the sauce belonging originally to fish cookery. Here it is used to dress an offal dish.
- Sheep's trotters are still soldThe second recipe uses feet, not brain, and feet are ordinary butcher's goods where there is demand for them. They need the full three hours; the collagen has to break down completely or the result is rubbery rather than sticky.
- The hinge of the trotter recipeThe finish is an egg-yolk liaison. Once the yolks and milk go in, the pan must be kept below a simmer — Beeton's "do not allow it to boil" is the whole instruction. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into threads.
- UnitsA gill is 5 fluid ounces, about 140 ml. Two quarts of water for the trotters is roughly 2.3 litres. The ounce quantities of salt and pepper in the ingredient list are corrupted in the original printing and should be treated as unreliable; season the braising liquid to taste.
- Sippets and croûtonsBoth are small pieces of bread, sippets usually toasted and croûtons usually fried. In the first recipe they alternate with the brains in the dish; in the second they garnish it. They soak up a sauce that is otherwise loose.
- Costs1s. 6d. and 3s. are Victorian prices for dishes serving six to eight, cheaper cuts costed for a household economising.
Offal recipes fill several pages of Beeton because a Victorian household bought the whole animal's worth of cheap protein and expected the cook to make it presentable — brains, feet, head and pluck all had their dressed forms. The trotter recipe is credited to Alexis Soyer, the celebrated chef of the Reform Club and a public figure in his own right, whose books circulated widely enough that later compilers lifted his methods by name. His finish here, butter worked cold with flour and lemon on a plate then melted into hot milk, and yolks stirred in off the boil, is straightforward French practice for a white sauce built in the pan. The brain dish tells you something else: its disappearance from the domestic repertoire owed something to changing taste, and something also to the BSE and scrapie controls of the 1990s, which removed a whole class of Victorian economy cookery from the legal food supply.