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.
Home › Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's › Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Blanch
Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Blanch
Blanch and bone two or more calves' or pigs' feet and put them into a stewpan with butter, leeks, or onions, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and a little stock. Let them boil till the liquid is somewhat reduced, then add good meat gravy and two tablespoonsful of tomato purée, and just before taking the stewpan off the fire, add the yolks of two eggs beaten up, a tablespoonful of grated cheese, and a tiny pinch of mullet, turbot, &c.), either cinnamon. Mix all well together and serve very hot.
No. III. Bodini Marinati Ingredients: Veal forcemeat, truffles, sweetbread, mushrooms, herbs, flour, pasta marinata (No. 17), tongue, butter.
Make a mixture of truffles, tongue, sweetbread, mushrooms, and herbs, all chopped up, and add it to a forcemeat of veal, the proportions being two-thirds veal forcemeat and the other ingredients onethird. Mix this well and form it into little balls about the size of a pigeon's egg, flour them and mask them all over with pasta marinata (No. 17). Fry them in butter over a slow fire, so that the balls may be well cooked through, and when they are the right colour dry them in a napkin and serve very hot. a These bodini may be made with various ingredients; they will be most delicate with forcemeat of fowl and bits of brain mixed with herbs, truffle, cooked ham, or tongue. They are also excellent made with fish (sole, cooked or raw, and marinated in lemon, salt, pepper, oil, nutmeg, and parsley.
Two separate preparations run together here: a braise of boned calves' or pigs' feet finished with egg and cheese, and bodini marinati, fried forcemeat balls in a batter coating. Both are workable, but the notes assume a cook who can bone a trotter and judge a slow fry.
- Skip the brain variationThe closing suggestion to mix "bits of brain" into fowl forcemeat is best ignored. Bovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material in the EU, UK and many other jurisdictions because of BSE and are not sold for food there; the other listed fillings stand on their own.
- The trotters carry the dishThe trotters — Calves' and pigs' feet contribute gelatine rather than much flavour. Blanch them from cold water and bone them while still warm; the reduced braising liquid will be correspondingly rich and sticky.
- Do not let the egg boilThe two beaten yolks go in off the heat, or with the pan pulled to the side. Anything approaching a simmer after they are added will scramble them and break the sauce.
- Grated cheeseProbably a hard grating cheese such as Parmesan, though the recipe does not say so. The single tablespoonful called for is a seasoning, not a thickener.
- Tomato puréeThe phrase probably means a strained tomato pulp, thinner and brighter than modern concentrated tube paste. If using tube paste, use considerably less than the two tablespoons stated and let it down with a little stock.
- Sweetbread preparationFor the bodini, soak the sweetbreads in cold water until the water runs clear, blanch briefly, then press under a weight before peeling the membrane and chopping. Raw sweetbread chopped into forcemeat will weep and loosen the mixture.
- Pasta marinataThe cross-reference (No. 17) appears to be a coating batter rather than a pasta dough. Any light flour-and-egg coating batter serves; the balls are floured first so the batter grips.
- Frying temperature"a slow fire" means gentle heat, and clarified butter will stand it better than whole butter. Balls the size of a pigeon's egg need several minutes to cook through to the centre; too hot a pan colours the crust before the veal forcemeat is set.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities to work from; two boned feet would make a course for perhaps three or four, and a pound of forcemeat mixture something like twenty pigeon-egg balls.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) set out to teach English households Italian cookery, its frame story following a party taking cooking lessons, and these two entries show the range it drew on: humble boiled trotters on one hand, and on the other a courtly fried forcemeat of veal, truffle, tongue and sweetbread. Bodini is a variant spelling of budini, Italian for puddings, a word often said to have been applied loosely to any bound and moulded mixture rather than to a sweet dish. Trotters and sweetbreads both belonged to a period when nothing edible left the carcass unused, and the offal cookery of northern Italy — Milanese and Piedmontese in particular — was built around exactly the ingredients listed here. The suggestion at the end that the same balls be made with sole or mullet, marinated in lemon and oil first, reflects the standard Italian practice of keeping a single technique and swapping the meat for fish on lean days.