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.

No. 1355

Sirloin of Beef with Brain Patties

Contrefilet de Boeuf aux Bouchees de Cervelles

Prepare and cook a sirloin as mentioned in (No. 1357), glaze and lay it on a very hot dish, and pour a little good gravy over. Serve separately some patties filled with brains cut in small squares combined with as much mushrooms cut the same, sauteing both in butter, season with salt, pepper, chopped parsley and finish with well buttered veloute sauce (No. 415). Serve also at the same time a sauce-boat of half-glaze with Madeira (No. 400), having it well buttered.

← No. 1354 Sirloin of Beef a la Thieblin Beef No. 1356 Sirloin of Beef with Chicory and Souffled Sw →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade, and every element points somewhere else in the book. The beef and the sauces are conventional French work; the filling is the problem.

Why the filling cannot be madeBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk material for BSE. The infectious agent is a prion, not a bacterium, and it is not destroyed by sautéing, roasting, or any temperature a kitchen can reach. In the United States brain from cattle 30 months and older is prohibited from the food supply, and comparable bans apply across the EU and UK.
Species does not fix itRanhofer does not say whether the cervelles are calf, beef, or lamb. Younger cattle are treated as lower risk rather than no risk, and sheep and goats carry their own transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, scrapie. If you want the dish, use a current recipe for a mushroom or sweetbread filling from a source written under modern regulation.
ContrefiletNot the American bone-in sirloin steak cut. Contrefilet is the boned strip loin from the short loin, the sirloin as an English roasting joint, trimmed and tied.
BoucheesSmall round puff-pastry cases, roughly two inches across, baked blind and filled at the last moment. The name means "mouthful." Ranhofer directs that they be served separately from the beef.
The cross-referencesNo. 415 is veloute, a white roux thinned with veal or chicken stock; No. 400 is half-glaze, what a modern kitchen calls demi-glace. "Well buttered" means finished off the heat with cold butter whisked in, which is what keeps both sauces glossy.
Glazing the jointTo glaze is to brush the roast with reduced stock and return it briefly to high heat until it shines. It is a surface treatment, not a separate cooking stage.
YieldA trimmed strip loin of 4 to 5 lb would serve roughly eight in this style, with the garnish served separately as the recipe directs.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working system, some 3,500 numbered entries cross-referencing one another the way a professional kitchen actually operates. Brains were standard high-end fare in that period: cheap, delicate, and prized for a texture no other offal gives, they appear throughout French cookery as cervelles au beurre noir, in fritters, and as here diced into a rich filling to set against plain roast beef. The pairing of a large glazed joint with a separate hot garnish and a sauce-boat is pure service a la russe, the sequence of plated courses that is generally said to have displaced the old crowded table over the course of the nineteenth century. The dish reads as ordinary luxury for its moment; it is the BSE outbreak of the 1980s and 1990s, and the restrictions that followed it, that pushed bovine brain to the margins of the food supply — in the United States the ban applies to cattle thirty months and older.