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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Chafing-dish Dainties (Just enough water to form)
just enough water to form a paste). Let the mixture simmer five minutes, stirring constantly; then set aside to become cool. Have some bits of bread prepared as for sandwiches. Heat some clarified butter in the blazer, and in it sauté the bread a delicate brown, and drain on soft paper.
Spread with the cold mixture, press two pieces together, and heat over hot water five or ten minutes. Serve hot. Calf's Head en Tortue.
Peel a dozen mushrooms; break the caps in pieces and chop the stems very fine. Sauté in three tablespoonfuls of butter, adding, if desired, half an onion cut fine. Sprinkle in one - fourth a cup of flour, half a teaspoonful, each, of salt and paprica, and, when the ingredients are well blended, add gradually one cup and a half of stock and one-fourth a cup of tomato juice. Let simmer a few moments, after the sauce boils; then add one pint of meat from a calf's head, cooked and cut in cubes.
This page is a fragment: the tail end of a brain-paste sandwich filling runs directly into the opening of Calf's Head en Tortue. Both halves are built on tissue that is no longer sold or eaten in this form, and the page cannot be cooked as printed.
- Why the sandwich filling failsThe mixture that is thinned to a paste, simmered and spread on sautéed bread is a brain preparation. Bovine and calf brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials because they can carry the prion that causes BSE; prions are not destroyed by simmering, sautéing, or the five to ten minutes over hot water called for here. There is no cooking step that makes this safe.
- Why the calf's head failsA calf's head is butchered whole, brain and skull-adjacent nervous tissue included. Bovine skull and brain are classed as specified risk material above certain ages (over 12 months in the EU, 30 months in the US) and are removed from the food chain, which is one reason whole heads are hard to buy in most Western markets, though cheek and tongue remain ordinary cuts and calf brains are still sold in some places. Use a current recipe for a mushroom-and-tomato ragoût if you want the sauce.
- En tortueFrench for "turtle style" — a brown sauce with mushrooms, tomato, wine and often olives and gherkins, so named because it echoed the flavourings of eighteenth-century turtle soup. The name describes the sauce, not the meat.
- BlazerThe upper pan of a chafing dish, used over direct flame. The "hot water" step refers to setting the blazer into the hot-water bath beneath it, the chafing dish's version of a double boiler.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. In turn-of-the-century American cookbooks it generally indicated a mild, Hungarian-style paprika, valued for colour in pale sauces as much as for heat.
- Clarified butterButter with the milk solids and water removed, so it can be brought to sauté temperature without browning or burning. Ghee is the same idea taken further — simmered until the solids brown, so it tastes nuttier — and is sold ready-made.
- StockThe recipe calls simply for a cup and a half of stock; an unseasoned brown stock suits the dish. Commercial broths are already salted, so reduce or hold back the half teaspoon of salt if you use one.
Calf's head was a cornerstone of nineteenth-century thrift cookery, prized because it yielded gelatinous meat, brains, tongue and a rich broth from an otherwise unsalable part of the animal; mock turtle soup, one of the most famous Victorian dishes, existed chiefly because a simmered calf's head convincingly imitated real turtle. Dressing it en tortue continued that logic the mushroom, tomato and wine garnish belonged to genuine turtle cookery, and applying it to the head was a deliberate, well-understood substitution rather than a disguise. Brains, likewise, were treated as a delicacy, soft and mild, and turn up throughout chafing-dish books because they cook in minutes and suit the small pan and the tableside performance the chafing dish was built for. Much of this receded from the late 1980s onward, as BSE was identified in British cattle and controls came in progressively, restricting bovine central nervous system tissue in the human food chain typically by age band rather than as a blanket ban, and with brains of other species still eaten; a whole category of respectable, economical Victorian cooking became difficult to reproduce within a single generation.