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. 1481

Brains a la Poulette with Mushrooms

Cervelles a la Poulette aux Champignons

Soak some brains in cold water for two hours, remove the sangineous skin enveloping them, and lay them in a saucepan to cook; cover with water, add a dash of vinegar, some sliced carrots and onions, a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf, a clove of garlic, and whole peppers; cook without boiling, letting them barely simmer on the side of the range half an hour; drain on a napkin and cut them lengthwise in four, range in a circle on a dish, and fill up the empty space with mushrooms added to a poulette sauce, pouring a part of it over the brains. Garnish around with triangle-shaped croutons of bread fried in clarified butter, and serve the remainder of the sauce separately.

← No. 1480 Brains a la Chassaigne Veal No. 1482 Brains in Matelote →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's method is sound classical technique, but the central ingredient is the problem: this is a calf's brain, recipe filed in The Epicurean's veal chapter, and bovine brain is no longer treated as food in most of the world.

Why this one failsBovine central nervous tissue — brain and spinal cord — is the tissue most heavily loaded with the infectious agent of BSE. Brain from cattle above a set age is classed as specified risk material and kept out of the human food supply: over 12 months in the UK and EU, 30 months and older in the United States. Brain from younger calves falls outside those thresholds and is still sold in some countries, but no ordinary cook can verify the age or herd status of a brain.
Cooking does not helpThe instruction to "cook without boiling, letting them barely simmer" holds the tissue around 175-185F, but this is not a matter of temperature. Prions are not inactivated by any cooking a kitchen can produce, including prolonged boiling or a hot oven, so no adjustment to the poaching makes the dish safe.
Not the same as other offalLamb, pork and calf sweetbreads, kidney and liver are all still sold and eaten; that is a separate question. The restriction here is specific to bovine brain and spinal cord, not to variety meats generally. If you want a poulette dish of this type, use a current recipe built on something else.
What the terms meanA la poulette is a velouté finished with egg yolk, cream and lemon or vinegar — a liaison that curdles above a bare simmer. "Sangineous skin" is Ranhofer's spelling of sanguineous: the blood-streaked membrane.
Clarified butterThe croutons are fried in butter with the milk solids and water removed, which raises the smoke point enough to brown bread without scorching. Ghee is a close relative, cooked longer so the solids brown, and is sold ready-made.
The soak and the acidThe two-hour cold soak draws out blood, and the dash of vinegar in the court-bouillon is conventionally credited with keeping the flesh pale and firm, as well as seasoning the cooking liquid. This is standard preparation for pale offal and is worth knowing even though you should not apply it here.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for more than thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down in numbered order — hence the run of consecutive brain recipes, No. 1480 through No. 1482, that a nineteenth-century à la carte menu would have needed. Calf's brains were unremarkable restaurant food then, prized for a texture closer to custard than to meat and generally poached in an acidulated court-bouillon and then dressed in a rich white sauce, which is the pattern here. Poulette, literally "young hen," names the egg-yolk-and-cream liaison rather than any poultry in the dish; the sauce turns up throughout the classical canon on mussels, tripe and lamb's feet. The dish's retreat from menus owes something to changing taste and a great deal to the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, after which regulators in Britain, Europe and North America removed bovine brain and spinal cord above set age limits from the food chain as specified risk material.