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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Scotch Woodcock (Beat thoroughly three eggs)
Beat thoroughly three eggs and three teaspoonfuls of anchovy paste. Put this into the chafingdish over hot water with three-fourths a cup of milk and stir until thick. Spread sippets of toast with butter and then with anchovy paste, and turn the woodcock upon them.
Calves' Brains and Mushrooms à la Poulette.
Sauté a clove of garlic, cut fine, in two tablespoonfuls of butter; add half a pound of mushrooms, peeled and broken in pieces, one-fourth a cup of flour, and sauté until well browned. Then add one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of mace and paprica, half a teaspoonful of salt and one cup and a half of stock, and cook five or six minutes.
Then add the yolks of two eggs, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley and three calves' brains, cooked, and cut in dice. Serve in timbale cases, or upon croustades of bread.
Two dishes run together on one page. The first, the anchovy-and-egg Scotch Woodcock, is straightforward period chafing-dish cookery; the second, the calves' brains à la poulette, is the reason for the warning above and should not be attempted.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal tissue can carry the agent of BSE, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Cooking does not reliably destroy prions, so there is no safe way to make the second recipe as written. These tissues are controlled as specified risk material in the US, UK and EU, with the restrictions keyed to the age of the animal.
- Not a substitution problemSweetbreads, veal or firm mushrooms would give a different dish entirely, and the point of an à la poulette here is the texture of the brains. If the sauce interests you, use a current velouté recipe and build it around an ingredient you can buy legally.
- The chafing dish is a double boiler"Put this into the chafing-dish over hot water" means the water pan, not the direct flame. A stainless bowl over barely simmering water does the same job and gives the same margin for error.
- The hinge: stop before it looks doneThree eggs with three-quarters of a cup of milk is a loose savoury custard. Pull it off the heat while it still slumps on the spoon; residual heat finishes it, and a few seconds too long turns it to fine curds in a thin puddle.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toast, crusts off. The recipe does not specify a number or a size.
- Anchovy pasteModern tubed anchovy paste may be saltier than the anchovy pastes and essences the recipe assumes, though this is not documented. If in doubt, start with two teaspoons in the egg mixture, taste, and add the third only if it needs it. No extra salt.
- YieldNot stated. Three eggs with three-quarters of a cup of milk would stretch to roughly two or three servings as a savoury.
- Timbale cases and croustadesBoth are edible containers — fried batter shells and hollowed fried or baked bread cases respectively. They belong to the second recipe and are worth knowing for other dishes in this section.
Scotch Woodcock belongs to the family of English savouries whose names promise game and deliver something else entirely: Welsh rabbit is the obvious cousin. It contains no woodcock and, so far as anyone has shown, nothing Scottish, and the name is generally taken as the same joke as Welsh rabbit — a bird for people not shooting birds. It appeared at the end of Victorian and Edwardian dinners as the savoury course, after the sweet, and moved from there into the American chafing-dish repertoire of the 1890s and 1900s, when the little spirit-lamp stove became fashionable for late suppers and cooking at the table. Versions vary in how the anchovy is handled; this one works it in twice, into the custard and onto the buttered sippet. The calves' brains that follow are a reminder that offal was ordinary, cheap and considered delicate — brains in a poulette sauce, that is, a velouté finished off the heat with egg yolks and lemon, was a standard restaurant preparation until well into the twentieth century.