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. 1485

Brains with Tomatoed Bearnaise Sauce (cervelles a la Sauce Bearnaise

Tomatee

Skin some brains, that is, remove carefully the membrane that covers them without breaking the brain; soak them in cold water for two hours, then plunge them into boiling water only to stiffen; drain and cook them for twelve minutes in a good white wine mirepoix and arrange them on a dish. Cover with a tomatoed Bearnaise sauce.

← No. 1484 Brains with Black or Hazelnut Butter Veal No. 1486 Brains with Venetian or Green Holandaise Sau →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer assumes a professional brigade with stock, mirepoix and a béarnaise already on hand. The technique itself is simple; the fussy part is all in the handling before the poaching.

What "brains" means hereIn the veal section this is calf's brain. Ranhofer gives no quantity, weight or number of servings.
Sourcing and BSE rulesBovine brain is a specified risk material. In the US, brain from cattle 30 months and older may not enter the food supply; in the EU and UK the skull including the brain is a specified risk material for cattle (and for sheep and goats) over 12 months, so material from older animals is excluded. Pork brain is unaffected and is cooked the same way. Buy only from a butcher who can tell you the species and the age.
The soak is not optionalTwo hours in cold water, changed two or three times, draws out blood and firms the tissue. Some cooks add a spoonful of vinegar to the water. Skip it and the finished brain looks grey and mottled rather than ivory.
Peeling the membraneThe outer membrane comes away most easily under a thin stream of cold running water, working with the fingertips from the flat side, and easier still if the brains are very cold. Note that Ranhofer skins before the soak, though many cooks find it easier the other way round.
"Only to stiffen"The plunge into boiling water is a brief blanch, only long enough to set the surface so the lobes hold together during poaching. Ranhofer then drains them and goes straight on to the cooking.
White wine mirepoixHere this is essentially a cooking liquor of diced carrot, onion, celery and herbs (Ranhofer's mirepoix normally also carries lean raw ham or salt pork), sweated in butter, moistened with dry white wine and a little water or light stock, and seasoned. Enough to cover the brains is the right quantity.
Poach, never boilThe twelve minutes must be at a bare shiver, around 180F. A rolling boil breaks the lobes apart and makes the texture grainy. Lift them out with a skimmer and drain on a cloth before dressing.
Tomatoed béarnaiseA standard béarnaise finished with a spoonful or two of thick, well-reduced tomato purée -- what a modern kitchen would call sauce Choron. Add the purée off the heat at the end so the emulsion does not break.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is essentially a French professional manual written in English for an American clientele who wanted to eat as Paris ate. Calf's brains were a standard entrée of that repertoire, valued for their mildness and their soft, custard-like texture, and Ranhofer gives a long run of them -- black butter, Venetian sauce, green hollandaise, this tomatoed béarnaise -- each differing only in the sauce, which is exactly how a nineteenth-century carte was built. The tomato-tinted béarnaise is generally credited to the Parisian restaurant Voisin and named for the chef Choron, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Offal of this kind held a respectable place on American restaurant menus well into the twentieth century; it fell away in the English-speaking world partly through changing taste and, after the 1990s, decisively through BSE regulation.