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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Calf's Brains in Matelote
Peel twenty small onions and put them into a saucepan with one ounce of butter, and fry to a light brown color; add half an ounce of flour, stirring well for a few minutes; then add one-half breakfast cupful of good broth, one teacupful of red wine, and salt and pepper to suit the taste. Place the pan on the side of the fire, and let the liquor simmer for thirty minutes. Open a can of mushrooms, pick them over, wash, and cut into fairly small pieces; put them into the sauce and boil for eight minutes longer. Drain the boiled brains, place on a warm dish, surrounded with the onions and mushrooms, and serve with the sauce poured over all.
This is the garnish and sauce only — Oscar assumes the brains have already been soaked, trimmed and poached elsewhere in the book, and that they arrive at the pan ready to be plated. Read it as a red-wine matelote sauce with an onion and mushroom garnish.
- The brains are cooked separatelyNothing in these instructions cooks the brains; they are drained and dressed with the finished sauce. Standard practice was to soak them several hours in cold water changed often, peel away the membrane, then poach gently in acidulated court-bouillon until firm, and hold them warm.
- Sourcing and lawBovine brain is a restricted commodity. In the UK and EU the skull and brain of cattle over twelve months are specified risk material and cannot be sold for food; in the US, brain from cattle aged thirty months or more is prohibited. Only young calf brain from a licensed butcher is legal, and many butchers will not handle it at all.
- Breakfast cupful and teacupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so read the half cup as about 4 to 5 fl oz of stock. A teacupful in this period runs smaller than a modern cup — treat it as about 4 to 5 fl oz of red wine as well.
- Oven and stove language"The side of the fire" is the cooler edge of a coal range: a bare simmer, the surface barely moving. On gas or induction that is the lowest useful setting, lid ajar.
- One ounce of butter, half an ounce of flourAbout 2 tablespoons butter and a scant 2 tablespoons flour. That is a fairly rich proportion of flour for 8 to 10 fl oz of liquid; the sauce is meant to be thick enough to coat, but add stock if it tightens past that during the thirty-minute simmer.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were commercially available by the 1890s and carry a faint tinny brine. Fresh small buttons, quartered and given a few minutes' longer cooking in the sauce, are a reasonable substitution.
- The onionsTwenty small onions suggests pearl, pickling or small boiling onions, peeled and left whole. Brown them slowly and evenly -- they need the full simmer to become tender through, and rushing the colour gives bitterness in a sauce this concentrated.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantity of garnish and sauce would suit roughly two calf brains as a first course.
A matelote is properly a sailor's dish — freshwater fish, usually eel or carp, stewed in red wine with onions and mushrooms, a staple of the riverside guinguettes along the Seine and the Loire. By the later nineteenth century the name had loosened to mean the treatment rather than the fish, and any soft, mild ingredient that could stand up to red wine and glazed onions might be served en matelote. Calf's brains, delicate and cheap, took the sauce well. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from 1893 and published this book in 1896, was writing for kitchens where offal was neither rustic nor apologetic: brains, sweetbreads and kidneys appear throughout the book dressed in the same French sauces as the finest cuts. The near-disappearance of brains from American menus came much later, and was already well under way before the BSE regulations of the 1990s.