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Brain Sauce

A savory sauce made from boiled onion, milk, bread crumbs, butter, arrowroot, brains, tongue, eggs, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brain Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the white sauce

  1. Boil the onion in the milk with peppercorns.

  2. Strain the milk over the bread crumbs.

  3. Mix the butter and arrowroot and stir into the mixture until it boils.

Prepare the brains

  1. Wash the brains in cold water with salt.

  2. Soak for an hour.

  3. Cover the cleaned brains with hot water and boil for 10-15 minutes, removing scum.

  4. Chop the brains.

  5. Mix with sage or parsley and melted butter.

  6. Warm the mixture carefully to avoid burning.

Assemble and serve

  1. Skin and trim the tongue.

  2. Place it in the center of a dish with the brains around it.

  3. Alternatively, chop the brains with shallot, parsley, and hard-boiled eggs.

  4. Mix with white sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Arrowroot + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Onion + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Sage + caperstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and sets when heated.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the infused milk and add body to the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded flavour, and moistens the brains.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the white sauce.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm texture and richness to the chopped brain mixture.
Tongue
Serves as the main meat, giving the dish its savoury centre.

The step that matters

Warm the brain mixture carefully. Brains are delicate protein. High heat makes them tough and grainy and can scorch the butter, so gentle warming keeps the mixture soft, smooth and palatable.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, milk, bread, butter, arrowroot, egg, capers):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, milk, bread, butter, arrowroot, egg, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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