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. 947

Rissoles of Brain, Princetown

Rissoles de Cervelles a la Princetown

Roll out a thin layer of brioche paste (No.130), cut round pieces from it with a three inch in diameter pastry cutter. Stir into two ounces of butter, one tablespoonful of very finely chopped onions, and add to it a pint and a half of reduced allemande sauce (No.407). Cut half a pound of brains into quarter inch dice pieces; wipe them dry, and fry them in butter on a hot fire with half their quantity of mushrooms, season and add this to the prepared sauce, then lay it aside to get cold. With this preparation garnish the pieces, forming it into balls each an inch and a half in diameter; moisten around, and fold the paste over in two, then set it aside to rise in a moderately warm place; when double the original size, fry the rissoles slowly until they are cooked and of a nice color, then dress them on folded napkins, and serve.

← No. 946a Chester Crusts Hot Side Dishes No. 948 Rissoles of Chicken →

For the Modern Kitchen

A yeast-raised fried turnover from Ranhofer's Delmonico kitchen, written for cooks who already had brioche dough and a stockpot of allemande on hand. Two things need fixing before you start: the sauce quantity and the unstated prep of the brains.

Scale the sauce downA pint and a half of reduced allemande to half a pound of brains is restaurant-batch proportion and would give you a soup, not a filling. For half a pound of brains and four ounces of mushrooms you want roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of very thick sauce — just enough to bind so the mixture can be rolled into balls when cold.
Allemande sauceAllemande is classically velout hickened with white roux (veal or chicken stock) and finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison, then reduced until it coats heavily; see No. 407 for Ranhofer's own version. Once the yolks are in, keep it below a simmer or it will curdle. It must be stiff and fully chilled before you shape the filling.
The brains need preparing firstRanhofer assumes it: soak in several changes of cold water to draw the blood, peel away the outer membrane, then poach gently in acidulated water or a light vinegar court-bouillon and chill before dicing. Raw brain will not hold a quarter-inch dice or dry off properly in the pan.
SourcingBovine brain from older cattle is classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food supply in the US, UK and EU because of BSE, though the age thresholds differ (30 months in the US, 12 months in the EU/UK), so young calf brains are not banned outright everywhere; in practice you will not buy them at a supermarket. Pork and lamb brains are still sold legally in some markets and by some butchers, and are what a modern cook would use here.
Brioche paste and the second riseNo. 130 is a rich egg-and-butter yeast dough. The book says only "a moderately warm place" and gives no figure; a warm room of around 80F suits it. Proof the filled turnovers until roughly doubled, which may take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on the room. Underproofed rissoles fry dense; overproofed ones tear and leak.
"Fry slowly"The book gives no temperature; read it as moderate fat, somewhere around 325-335F rather than the 375F you would use for a fritter. The dough is enriched and thick, and it needs time for the centre to set before the crust colours; hotter fat gives a brown shell around raw paste. Turn them once and expect roughly 4-6 minutes.
SealingMoisten only the outer rim of the round, keep the filling well back from the edge, and press firmly. Any sauce caught in the seam will blow open in the fat.
Yield and serviceThree-inch rounds folded over a 1 1/2-inch ball give about 18-20 rissoles from this quantity of filling — a hot side dish or savoury course for eight to ten. The folded napkin was there to absorb frying fat; a rack and a paper-lined dish do the same job.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organised as a professional's reference: numbered recipes that cross-refer to numbered pastes and mother sauces rather than standing on their own. Rissole is connected to the French verb rissoler, to brown in fat, though the noun is the older word — it descends through Old French from a Latin root meaning "reddish" — and by the nineteenth century it meant a small fried pastry with a bound, highly seasoned filling, a way of dressing up trimmings and offal for a formal menu. Brains, poached and diced with mushrooms in a velouté-based sauce, were a familiar garniture in that tradition; American appetite for them appears to have faded well before BSE regulation restricted calf brains. Ranhofer routinely attached place and patron names to his dishes, and "à la Princetown" is very likely one of these house dedications rather than a dish with a documented origin; the book gives no explanation, and none should be invented for it.