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. 2934

Scrambled Eggs a la Columbus

Œufs Brouilles a la Columbus

After the eggs are nearly done mix in with them some cooked lean quarter-inch squares of ham; cut some slices of raw blood pudding (No. 1772), fry them in butter over a brisk fire, then arrange them on a baking sheet and allow to cool off; bread-crumb and dip in egg, then fry to a fine color. Also saute some slices of beef brains over a quick fire. Dress the scrambled eggs, putting half the preparation on a dish and the brains in the center; cover these with the remainder of the eggs and surround with the fried slices of black pudding. Garnish the top with very thin half slices of sausage.

← No. 2933 Poached Eggs with Spinach Eggs & Omelets No. 2935 Scrambled Eggs a la Duxelle and with Anchovy →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's composed egg dish depends on two components that have not survived intact into the modern kitchen: beef brains and a home-made fresh blood pudding cross-referenced from elsewhere in the book. The eggs themselves are the least of it.

Beef brains are the blocking problemBovine skull and brain from cattle over twelve months of age is classified as specified risk material in the UK and the EU and must be removed from the food chain; in the United States the FDA prohibits brains from cattle aged thirty months or over in human food. The concern is the prion agent associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and ordinary cooking does not destroy prions -- sauteing over a quick fire has no effect on them.
The blood pudding is not a shop purchaseNo. 1772 is a blood pudding made from scratch within The Epicurean, and this recipe calls for it raw. Fresh blood is a high-risk medium for Salmonella and other enterics, and no temperatures or holding times are given in the recipe as printed here. A commercially produced black pudding is a different and regulated product.
What the dish actually isHalf the scrambled eggs on the dish, sauteed brains in the centre, the rest of the eggs over them, a ring of crumbed and fried blood pudding slices around the edge, and very thin half slices of sausage on top. It is a plated construction rather than a skillet dish; the ham is stirred in while the eggs are still only nearly done.
"Brisk" and "quick" fireBoth mean high heat — roughly what a modern cook would call medium-high to high on a gas burner. Ranhofer uses "brisk," "quick" and "good" fire throughout the book as relative terms; there are no oven temperatures in this recipe at all, since the baking sheet is used only as a cooling surface.
Bread-crumb and dip in eggThe original gives the order as crumbing first, then dipping in egg; standard breading elsewhere runs egg before crumb, so this may be shorthand rather than a distinct method. The slices are fried, arranged on a baking sheet and cooled before they are breaded and fried again.
If you want the idea without the riskScrambled eggs with diced ham and fried black pudding is an entirely ordinary combination, but work from a current recipe using a commercially made pudding, and leave the brains out. Nothing here should be reconstructed from Ranhofer's cross-references.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summation of his long tenure as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its thousands of numbered recipes are cross-referenced like a technical manual -- hence the pointer to No. 1772 for the blood pudding. The name may be a nod to the Columbian moment: the quadricentennial of 1492 filled 1892 and 1893 with Columbus banquets and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Ranhofer, who often named dishes for visiting notables and civic occasions, was at work on the book in those years. The composition also shows what a nineteenth-century luxury kitchen took for granted: brains, blood pudding and offal appeared on fashionable restaurant menus as well as economy tables.