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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Cerveau Salade
Calf's brains, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, mayonnaise dressing, lettuce, capers.
Wash the brains thoroughly in cold water, remove the red membrane. Cook them in boiling salted water with one tablespoonful of lemon juice ten minutes, then plunge into cold water. Cut the brains into small pieces, and mix them lightly with some of the mayonnaise. Arrange nests of lettuce leaves on a salad dish, put in each one a little of the salad, cover with mayonnaise and sprinkle with capers.
Potato a la Parisienne Salad.
Four or six potatoes, mayonnaise dressing, parsley, two beets. Pare and cut the potatoes with a vegetable cutter, into little balls the size of marbles. Cook them in boiling salted water until tender, drain and dry carefully. While warm mix them with the mayonnaise. Pour the potato balls in the center of a salad dish, sprinkle over them chopped parsley. Garnish with a border of pickled beets, which have been cut into points. Tomato Aspic Salad. No. I.
One pint of tomatoes, one teaspoonful of salt, one saltspoonful of pepper, one teaspoonful of onion juice, one-fourth of a box of gelatine, one-half pint of mayonnaise dressing, lettuce, parsley.
Strain the tomatoes, add the salt, pepper and onion juice, add the gelatine. Soak for half an hour, then bring it to the boiling point, and pour into small moulds. Put away to harden.
When ready to serve, arrange nests of lettuce leaves on a salad dish, and turn out each mould of tomato jelly in the nests. Pour the mayonnaise dressing around them, sprinkle with chopped parsley.
The page runs three salads together. The first cannot be made safely today, and the reasons are specific to the tissue it calls for; the two that follow it are ordinary vegetable salads with a few dated conventions.
- Why the brain salad is off the tableBovine central nervous tissue — brain and spinal cord — is the tissue that carries the infectious agent of BSE, and consumption is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is fatal. Calf's brains are bovine central nervous tissue, though regulations distinguish between animals of different ages.
- Cooking does not helpThe prion protein responsible is not destroyed by boiling, by the ten minutes given here, or by any temperature reachable in a domestic kitchen. It resists ordinary sterilisation. There is no version of this timing that makes the dish safe.
- Supply has largely been closed offFollowing the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, brain and spinal cord from cattle over a certain age were classified as specified risk material and banned from the food supply in the UK, the EU and elsewhere, with related restrictions in the US. A recipe like this belongs to a period before any of that was understood. Skip it.
- Uncooked mayonnaiseAll three salads lean on a homemade mayonnaise that is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise, particularly if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
- The vegetable cutterFor the Parisienne potatoes this means a small scoop of the kind now sold as a melon baller. Cut the balls from peeled raw potatoes and cook them gently; they break up if the water is at a hard boil.
- Dress the potatoes warmThe instruction to mix them with mayonnaise while still warm is the one that matters. Warm potato absorbs dressing; cold potato sheds it and the salad turns bland and greasy.
- A box of gelatineA period box held about an ounce, roughly four of today's quarter-ounce envelopes, so one-fourth of a box is about one envelope (7 g) — enough to set a pint of liquid to a soft mould. Soften it in a little of the cold tomato first, then warm to dissolve rather than actually boiling it; boiling weakens the set.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. Onion juice means the liquid pressed or grated from a raw onion, not a bottled product; a teaspoon of finely grated onion, squeezed, is the equivalent.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century economy meat, sold cheaply by butchers and treated as a delicacy in French cookery — cervelle de veau au beurre noir was a bistro fixture, and a chilled, mayonnaise-bound version was a natural extension once salads became fashionable dinner-party food. Calling it Cerveau Salade is of a piece with the rest of this page: the French label was a genteel way of dressing up offal, just as Parisienne here means nothing more than potato cut into balls. The tomato aspic points the other way, toward what was then a new enthusiasm. Commercial powdered gelatine, sold in boxes rather than boiled from calves' feet, is generally said to have reached households in the late nineteenth century and set off decades of moulded salads. All three recipes assume a cook who will make mayonnaise by hand as a matter of course.