No. 1549

Spinal Marrow of Veal a la Villeroi

Amourettes de Veau a la Villeroi

Lay some very fresh spinal marrow for one hour in cold water; scrape off or remove the covering and the sanguineous parts over-spreading the marrow, then put them back into cold water for another hour. Drain and lay them in a saucepan, cover them with water, season with salt, whole peppers, vinegar, sprigs of parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Boil slowly for fifteen minutes, then drain and cut them in two inch length slices; season them with salt and mignonette. Cover each piece with a little Villeroi sauce (No. 560), lay them on a plate, and when very cold detach each one with a knife; roll them in eggs and bread-crumbs, smooth the surfaces with a knife, then plunge them into very hot fat, a few at the time, until they assume a nice golden color. Drain and arrange them on a folded napkin, garnishing the tops with fried parsley.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a dish of bovine spinal cord, and that single fact settles it: the tissue at the centre of the recipe is one that modern food law treats as hazardous waste rather than as food. The notes below explain the terms and the technique for readers, not as a set of working instructions.

Why it fails: the tissue itselfAmourettes are the spinal cord, taken from the vertebral canal. Central nervous tissue is the site where the prions responsible for BSE concentrate, and prions are not destroyed by fifteen minutes of simmering or by a plunge into hot fat. The recipe calls for veal, and detectable infectivity in cattle rises with age, but no domestic cooking step reduces the risk.
Why it fails: it is not legal foodWhy it fails: the regulatory position -- Bovine spinal cord falls under the specified risk material rules adopted after the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 90s. In the UK and EU the spinal cord of cattle above the qualifying age must be removed at slaughter and destroyed, and US rules classify spinal cord as an SRM in older cattle. Younger animals fall outside parts of these rules, but spinal cord is not something a butcher will ordinarily supply for the table.
Not the same as marrowThe title's "spinal marrow" is the nineteenth-century English for moelle épinière, the cord. It is unrelated to the fatty marrow inside a beef shin bone, which remains ordinary food and is not covered by the SRM rules.
Villeroi sauceRanhofer cross-references his No. 560. In the classical repertoire a Villeroi is a thick allemande-type sauce, usually fortified with mushroom and sometimes truffle essence, reduced until it sets firm when cold. Its purpose here is structural: the sauce is used as a stiff jacket so that a soft item can be crumbed and fried without collapsing, the same principle behind a croquette.
MignonetteMignonette pepper is coarsely cracked pepper, usually white, used where ground pepper would be too fine. "Whole peppers" in the poaching liquor means whole peppercorns.
"Sanguineous parts"The soaking, scraping and second soak are a cleaning routine familiar from other offal preparations of the period: cold water draws out blood, and the enveloping membrane is peeled to keep the piece pale. The same sequence is still used for brains and sweetbreads.
If you want the dishThe Villeroi treatment — a firm cold sauce coating, egg, crumbs, deep fat, fried parsley — was applied to a range of soft ingredients elsewhere in Ranhofer, sweetbreads among them. Use a current recipe for one of those instead.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its veal chapter reflects a kitchen that expected to sell every part of the calf to a paying room: brains, ears, sweetbreads, head, and three or four separate preparations of amourettes. The French name is a diminutive of amour, and the delicate texture of poached cord — soft, faintly gelatinous, close to brains — is generally offered as the reason for it. À la Villeroi is traditionally traced to the ducal house of Villeroy, one of many eighteenth-century French sauces attached to an aristocratic patron, and by Ranhofer's day it had become simply the professional name for the technique of masking something soft in a stiff cold sauce before crumbing and frying. Dishes like this vanished from restaurant menus long before BSE made spinal cord legally untouchable; the fashion for elaborate offal cookery faded with the service style that supported it.