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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Stewed Calf's Tongue and Brains
Place in hot water a boiled calf's tongue and a cooked brain, keeping the brain as whole as possible, and get them hot. Make a brown gravy by stirring one tablespoonful each of butter and flour over the fire until light brown, and then slowly stir in one pint of boiling water; season with one teaspoonful of salt, and pinch or two of pepper, and one gill of vinegar; lay the tongue and brain on a hot dish, pour the gravy over, and serve at once. Or serve them with a hot sauce made by mixing with a breakfast cupful of mayonnaise, one saltspoonful of dry mustard, one tablespoonful each of chopped parsley, capers and pickles, and one teaspoonful of grated onion.
Oscar assumes the tongue and brains are already cooked and waiting — this page is only the reheating and the sauce. The preliminary work is where the dish is won or lost.
- "Hot sauce" is not heatedThe second option is a piquant mayonnaise, not a warm one. Mayonnaise held over heat splits; mix it cold and spoon it beside the hot meat.
- What comes beforeA calf's tongue is simmered 2-3 hours with aromatics until a skewer slides in easily, then peeled while still warm. Brains are soaked in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, the surface membrane and clots lifted away, then poached 15-20 minutes in water with a splash of vinegar, which firms them and keeps them pale.
- Reheating"Get them hot" means hot water just below a simmer for a few minutes. A boil will break the lobes apart, and the instruction to keep the brain whole is the whole point of the presentation.
- MeasuresA gill is 1/2 cup. A saltspoonful is about 1/4 teaspoon. A breakfast cupful is a generous cup, 8-10 fl oz.
- The vinegarHalf a cup of vinegar in a pint of gravy is aggressive by current taste, and the strength of nineteenth-century vinegar was not standardised, so it may not have matched today's 5 percent. Add it in stages and stop when the sauce is sharp rather than sour.
- The rouxOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of liquid gives a thin gravy. Cook it to light brown over moderate heat, then add the boiling water in a slow stream off the heat to avoid lumps.
- SourcingBeef and veal brains are still sold by some butchers but are restricted or prohibited in many countries as specified risk material, because prion disease is not destroyed by cooking. If you cannot buy them from a licensed butcher, do not substitute an unofficial source; the tongue stands on its own with this gravy.
- YieldOne tongue and one brain, sliced and shared out, should serve about four as a main course.
Tongue and brains together on one dish is often taken as characteristic nineteenth-century hotel cookery: two cuts that required long careful handling, presented as a delicacy — though how cheap they were, and whether the labour itself was the luxury, is more a matter of interpretation than of record. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 book records the kind of variety-meat cookery that was then unremarkable in American restaurants and homes alike — brains fried in crumbs, tongue braised or pressed, sweetbreads in cream. The brown gravy sharpened with vinegar belongs to the same family as the German saure Zunge and the French sauce piquante, both of which use acid to cut the richness of a fatty organ; the alternative mayonnaise with mustard, capers, parsley and pickle is essentially a remoulade, the standard cold accompaniment to boiled meats in that era. Offal fell out of favour in American kitchens over the twentieth century, and bovine brain in particular was largely legislated off the market after the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, which is why a dish that once needed no explanation now does.