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.
Ravioli
Put on the bread board about two pounds of flour in a heap; make a hollow in the middle and put in it a piece of butter, three egg-yolks, salt and three or four tablespoonfuls of lukewarm water. Make a paste and knead it well, then let it stand for an hour, wrapped or covered with a linen cloth. Then spread the paste to a thin sheet, as thin as a ten-cent piece.
Chop and grind pieces of roast or boiled chicken meat: add to it an equal part of marrow from the bones of beef and pieces of brains, three yolks, some crumbs of bread soaked in milk or broth and some grated cheese (Parmesan or Swiss). Rub through a sieve and make little balls as big as a hazel-nut, which are to be placed at equal distances (a little more than an inch) in a line over the sheet of paste.
Beat a whole egg and pass it over the paste with a brush all around the little balls. Cover these with another sheet of paste, press down the intervals between each ball, and then separate each section from the other with a knife. Moisten the edges of each section with the finger dipped in cold water, to make them stick together, and press them down with the fingers or the prongs of a fork. Then put to boil in water seasoned with salt or, better still, in broth. The ravioli are then to be served hot seasoned with cheese and butter or with brown stock or tomato sauce. 11
This is a filled-pasta recipe whose stuffing is built on calf's or beef brains alongside chicken and marrow. The pasta technique is unremarkable; the filling is the problem, and it is not one that better sourcing or longer cooking resolves.
- Why the cautionBovine brain and spinal tissue are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the agent behind variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The prion involved is not destroyed by boiling, by the brief simmer these ravioli get, or by any domestic cooking. Sale of cattle brain from animals over a set age is restricted or banned outright in the UK, EU and elsewhere.
- Cooking does not helpUnlike bacterial hazards, prions survive temperatures far beyond anything a kitchen produces. There is no time or temperature that makes this filling safe, which is why no corrected version is given here. Use a current ravioli recipe.
- MarrowIn the EU/UK it is the vertebral column of older cattle that is controlled as specified risk material, so bones carrying vertebral matter are restricted, while shaft marrow from long bones is widely sold and eaten. The recipe's proportions are loosely worded -- "an equal part of marrow from the bones of beef and pieces of brains" -- but on any reading the filling is extremely rich by modern taste.
- Vague quantitiesThe original gives two pounds of flour and three yolks for the dough but no weight at all for the chicken, marrow, brains or breadcrumbs, only proportions. "A piece of butter" is likewise open and left to the cook's judgement.
- "Thin as a ten-cent piece"A US dime is a little over one millimetre thick, which is thick for filled pasta by current standards but sensible for a hand-rolled sheet that has to hold a wet filling without tearing.
Ravioli in broth is one of the oldest documented forms of Italian filled pasta, appearing in manuscript cookery from the fourteenth century onward, and a meat-and-cheese filling served in clear stock has parallels in the northern traditions of agnolotti and anolini. Brains were widely eaten across Europe and America well into the twentieth century, and their retreat from Western kitchens owes much to the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.