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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Ravioles of Game in Consomme
Remove the skin and sinews from two fillets of any uncooked game, chop the latter up and pound in a mortar with half their bulk each of cooked calf's brains, raw beef marrow, and grated Parmesan cheese. Add the yolks of two eggs to form the mass into a stiff paste, and with it prepare sixty or seventy ravioles. Plunge them into a saucepan of boiling water, boil for one or two minutes, remove the pan from the fire, cover it over and let the ravioles remain for another two or three minutes. Take them out, drain, put them in a soup tureen, pour over two or three quarts of game consomme, and serve.
This is a garnish course from the Waldorf's soup repertoire — a game forcemeat sealed in pasta and served in clear consomme. Two of its components put it outside what a modern kitchen can safely reproduce, so the notes below explain the terms and then the problems.
- Calf's brainsBovine central nervous tissue is tightly regulated because of BSE and its human form, vCJD: in the EU the skull and brain of cattle over 12 months of age are classed as specified risk material, and in the US brain from cattle 30 months and older is excluded from human food. Brain from younger calves may still be sold in some markets, but it is hard to source and prion risk is not reduced by cooking. Treat this component as a reason not to make the recipe as written.
- Barely cooked game forcemeatThe filling goes in raw and gets one or two minutes at a boil plus two or three minutes off the heat. A dense paste inside sealed pasta will not reach a safe internal temperature in that time. Wild game can carry Trichinella, Toxoplasma and other parasites that require a verified core temperature, not a residual soak.
- "Ravioles"Oscar's spelling follows the French; the pasta is ordinary ravioli, rolled thin and cut small. Sixty or seventy of them from two game fillets tells you the size — bite-sized, meant to float in soup rather than be eaten as a pasta course.
- Beef marrowRaw marrow scooped from cracked leg bones, used here as the fat that keeps a lean game filling from drying out. It is still sold by butchers as marrow bones, and it is the one component of this filling that is unremarkable.
- "Half their bulk each"The measurement is by volume, not weight, and Oscar means half the volume of the chopped game for each of the three additions — so the game is a minority of the finished paste. Vague by modern standards, and impossible to pin down exactly.
- YieldTwo or three quarts of consomme with sixty or seventy small ravioli is a soup course for eight to twelve. If you want this idea, use a current recipe for a cooked game or poultry ravioli filling and a well-clarified stock.
Filled pasta in clear broth was a fixture of the grand hotel soup list at the turn of the century, sitting between the French classical repertoire Oscar Tschirky trained in and the Italian cooking that New York restaurants were beginning to absorb. The forcemeat follows familiar nineteenth-century logic: lean game is bulked out with marrow for richness, brains for a soft, almost custardy texture, and Parmesan for salt and savour, bound with yolk into something stiff enough to handle. Brains and marrow were both ordinary larder items in that era's professional kitchen and appear in forcemeats and garnishes of the Escoffier period; their near-total disappearance from Western menus owes to BSE regulation and changed taste rather than any loss of the technique. Pulling the pan off the fire and letting the ravioli stand covered reads as a way of finishing delicate pasta gently so it does not burst before it reaches the tureen — whatever the intention, it is why the filling never gets cooked through.