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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Sauce for Sucking Pig
305. Boil the inside of a French roll with an onion and salt, then take a quarter pint of the gravy from the roasting pig, and having chopped the brains and a sage leaf or two, beat them and the roll up with the gravy; add a little butter, lemon-juice, mushroom ketchup, and half a glass of port or white wine. For currant sauce, if preferred (see par. 312).
A brain-thickened pan sauce of the sort served with whole roast suckling pig in mid-Victorian Britain. The central ingredient puts it outside modern practice, but the surrounding vocabulary is worth decoding for anyone reading the book.
- Why this one is off the tableThe body of the sauce is the roast pig's own brain, chopped and beaten into the gravy, and the recipe gives no cooking step for the brains at any point. Pig brain is not cattle specified risk material and is not banned from the food chain, but undercooked pig offal carries a documented risk of Streptococcus suis, and in parts of Southeast Asia pigs have been associated with Nipah virus. Beating chopped brain into gravy off the heat gives no reliable kill step.
- Not a matter of cooking it longerPrions are not destroyed by roasting, boiling or the acid in lemon juice and wine, and no domestic treatment makes cattle specified risk material safe; that framing belongs to beef rather than to the pig brain here, but the practical correction is the same, which is to use a current sauce recipe for roast pork rather than to adjust this one.
- "The inside of a French roll"The soft crumb of a small white bread roll, crust discarded. It was the standard Victorian thickener for bread sauce and its relatives, boiled with onion until it collapsed and then beaten smooth.
- A quarter pint of gravyIn an English book of this period that is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup, taken from the dripping pan and skimmed.
- Half a glass of wineA Victorian wine glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half a glass is roughly 1 fl oz, about two tablespoons. Port and white wine are offered as alternatives, not additions.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, closer to a light soy or Worcestershire sauce than to anything tomato. It is still sold in Britain and is used a teaspoon at a time.
- The alternative the author offersThe closing cross-reference sends the reader to a currant sauce, which was the other conventional accompaniment to suckling pig and involves no offal at all.