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 Lambs' Tongues
Place six lambs' tongues in a saucepan of water and boil for an hour and a half; take them out, plunge into cold water, take out again and skin. Place a little more than three tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan, with an onion cut in slices, two slices of carrot and three of turnip, and cook gently for a quarter of an hour. Sprinkle in three tablespoonfuls of flour, and stir well until it is brown, pour in a quart of stock, boil it up, put in the tongue, and sprinkle over a tablespoonful of salt and a little pepper, and add a bunch of sweet herbs. Place the saucepan at the side of the fire, and let it simmer for two hours. When they are done, put the tongues in the center of the dish, garnish with a vegetable, strain the gravy over, and serve. Mutton. Sheep's Brains, Poulette Cleanse the brains by placing them in boiling water, wash them well in cold water and let them drain. Prepare in a stewpan a quantity of sauce with a little stock thickened with the white of an egg, a little butter, cream and flour, also two or three small onions finely minced, boiled and mashed, a few small mushrooms, a squeeze of lemon juice and pepper and salt to taste. Pour one teaspoonful of lemon juice over each brain, sprinkle a little marjoram and sage over them, then put the brains into the sauce, and allow them to simmer gently for twenty minutes. Remove them when done, and place them on a dish. Boil up the sauce, pour it over, and serve.
Two recipes run together here. The lambs' tongues are straightforward braising work that translates cleanly; the sheep's brains that follow do not, and the reasons are set out below.
- Why the brains cannot be madeWhy the brains are hard to obtain -- Sheep brain carries a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy risk (scrapie). In the EU and UK the skull, including the brain, of sheep and goats over 12 months of age is classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food chain; brain from younger lambs is not covered by that rule. Controls in the United States and Canada are aimed chiefly at cattle. In practice sheep and lamb brain is rarely stocked by butchers.
- Cooking does not helpThe prion proteins involved are not inactivated by the twenty-minute simmer given here, nor by any ordinary kitchen heat. This is not a matter of undercooking, so no adjusted time or temperature makes the dish safe.
- Egg-white thickened sauceThe poulette sauce is separately unsound as written: white of egg stirred into warm stock will simply set into threads rather than thicken. A modern sauce poulette is finished with yolks and cream off the heat.
- The tongues are a different matterTongue is not a restricted tissue and lambs' tongues, fresh or brined, are still sold by butchers who handle offal. The rest of these notes apply to that recipe only.
- Skin them warmThe cold-water plunge is only to make them handleable. Peel the rough outer skin while the tongues are still hot to the hand, working from the tip back; once fully cold it clings and tears.
- MeasuresA quart of stock is 4 cups. The recipe asks for a little more than three tablespoons of butter, roughly 1.5 to 2 oz, and it wants a heavy pan so the flour browns without scorching.
- Cut the saltA full tablespoon of salt in a quart of stock is far too much by present standards, particularly if the stock is already seasoned or the tongues were brined. Season the sauce at the end instead.
- "At the side of the fire"This means the cooler edge of a coal range: a bare simmer, no more. On a modern hob use the lowest setting with the lid ajar, or hold it in a 300F oven for the two hours.
- Sweet herbs and yieldA bunch of sweet herbs is a bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied together. Six tongues serve three or four as a main course.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, is often taken, on the evidence of its compressed instructions and its assumption that stock is always to hand, to have been assembled as a working reference for a hotel kitchen rather than a home cook. Offal cookery of this kind filled the middle of a large restaurant menu: tongues, brains, sweetbreads and kidneys were cheap, arrived daily with the carcass, and were dressed in the same brown and white sauces that classical French practice supplied for everything else. Sheep's brains à la poulette was a standard of the period, the name pointing to the lemon-sharpened white sauce rather than to any chicken in the dish. Lamb and sheep brain has all but disappeared from Anglo-American eating: offal consumption was already falling well before the 1990s, and the BSE and scrapie controls of that decade, which are age-limited rather than outright, further narrowed its availability.