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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Sheep's Brains with Remoulade Sauce
Steep four or five sheep's brains in cold water, remove the skin, and place them in fresh cold water for an hour. Put some vegetables cut in pieces into a saucepan of cold water for an hour, and add a sprig of parsley, one wineglassful of Madeira or white wine and a little salt. Boil for a few minutes, then put in the brains, and boil again for ten minutes; take out the brains, drain them, put them on a dish, and mask with hot remoulade sauce.
This is a straightforward piece of turn-of-the-century French offal cookery, but the main ingredient is no longer available as food in much of the world, and for a specific reason.
- Sheep's brain is specified risk materialSince the BSE/TSE controls of the late 1990s and 2000s, the brain and spinal cord of sheep and goats over twelve months old (or with a permanent incisor erupted) have been classified as specified risk material in the UK and EU and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. Comparable restrictions exist in other jurisdictions. Brain from animals below that age threshold is not covered, but a butcher supplying adult sheep's brains for the table is not operating legally.
- Cooking does not address the hazardThe concern with ruminant central nervous tissue is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. Prions are not inactivated by boiling, by the ten minutes in wine-scented court bouillon here, or by any domestic cooking temperature. The precautionary rules exist precisely because heat is no help.
- Scrapie is the sheep-specific issueSheep carry their own transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, scrapie. It has never been shown to cause disease in humans, but the regulatory response after BSE was to treat ovine nervous tissue as unfit for consumption rather than to wait for evidence. That judgement has not been reversed.
- Do not substitute another animal's brainBrain from cattle over twelve months is specified risk material for the same reason as adult sheep's brain; calf brain, the classic French cervelle de veau, comes from animals below that age threshold and so remains legally available in some countries. Pork brain is not covered by TSE rules but carries its own parasite and handling concerns and is not a like-for-like swap in this preparation.
- If you want the sauceRémoulade is classically a mayonnaise sharpened with mustard, capers and chopped herbs, sometimes with anchovy; here it is served hot rather than cold. It is worth making from a current recipe and putting over poached fish or cold meat, where it belongs just as well.
- What to cook insteadFor a dish in the same register — a delicate, mild organ meat poached in an acidulated broth — use a modern recipe for sweetbreads or for poached veal tongue from a reputable current source.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book reflects the classical French repertoire an American luxury hotel was expected to command in full. Brains were a standard part of that repertoire, not an oddity: French cookery treated cervelles as one of the fine white offals alongside sweetbreads, blanched in a wine-sharpened court bouillon to firm the delicate tissue, then dressed with something assertive cblack butter, a vinaigrette, or as here a r cmoulade, a mustard-and-caper mayonnaise whose name is generally traced to Picard dialect for a sharp root or horseradish. That a hotel could list four or five sheep's brains without comment says something about the era's whole-carcass economy, in which a kitchen brigade large enough to peel membranes off brains was simply part of the establishment. Brains had in any case been retreating from English-language menus for a long time before regulators removed the ingredient from the food chain altogether.