To serve four.

This is the third of the four lamb’s brains recipes Mr. Henderson has shared in the cookbook, and sadly, it’s my least favorite of the trio I’ve made so far. Maybe I made a few mistakes while assembling it, thus the poor result. I’d much rather point the finger at myself as the reason I didn’t enjoy it, but I tried to follow the recipe as close as possible.

I started off by placing the endives in an oven proof dish with a few knobs of butter, some salt, pepper and a big splash of lemon juice.

Next, I covered the endives with aluminum foil and set them in a medium hot oven for a little under an hour to soften and soak up the butter and lemon juice.

While the endives cooking, it was time to pay attention to the shallots. I tossed a dozen peeled shallots with olive oil, sea salt and pepper before placing them in the oven with the endives.

As I was prepping for this dish, I poached the lamb brains exactly the same way I did for the Cold Brains on Toast. After they had cooled enough, I slipped them into hot, large-ish frying pan with another knob of butter for browning. When they had taken on a bit of color I removed them from the pan.

The now softened endives also needed browning, so I sliced each of them in half, dropped them into the same pan I used for the brains and turned the heat up.

With everything properly browned, the brains and shallots were re-introduced to the pan along with a splash of chicken stock. I bumped the heat back up to let the ingredients “get to know each other.”

Right before I plated the dish, a dash of sherry vinegar was added and then slightly cooked off. I then divvied up the brains, shallots, and endives. Finally, I sprinkled each plate with capers and some curly parsley.

Modesty aside, I think it’s a very pretty presentation. I just wish that the taste was proportional. There were so many flavors fighting for my taste-buds that I was really thrown for a loop. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, savory; it ran the entire gamut. Again, maybe I made a mistake somewhere. I’d like to think I did, because otherwise this recipe just doesn’t seem to work at all.

One down, one hundred and fifteen to go.