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.
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Brains and Tomatoes
Cook the brains, as said before, in water. Have good tomatoes, well seasoned with salt, pepper and very finely cut parsley, and a piece of butter the size of a walnut. When the tomatoes are well cooked, throw in the brains and cook very few minutes.
The method here is sound cookery, but the main ingredient is no longer an ordinary purchase, and in much of the world it is not legally food at all.
- Why bovine brain is the problemBrain and spinal cord from cattle are the tissues that carry the highest load of infectious prion in BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), the agent linked to variant CJD in humans. Prions are not proteins that cooking destroys; the few minutes of simmering here, or any domestic cooking, leaves infectivity intact.
- Legal statusUnder the post-BSE controls, the skull including the brain of cattle over 12 months of age is classed as specified risk material and excluded from the human food chain in the EU and UK; in the United States brain from cattle aged 30 months and over is prohibited. Brain from younger animals is not banned everywhere, but commercial slaughter practice has largely eliminated the retail trade in calf brains regardless of age.
- The recipe assumes a prior step"Cook the brains, as said before" points back to an earlier entry in the book, which is not reproduced here. On its own this page is not a complete set of instructions, which is another reason it cannot simply be followed.
- Not a general caution about offalLiver, kidney, heart, tongue and sweetbreads raise none of these issues and are still sold. If you want a dish of this shape — offal finished briefly in a seasoned tomato sauce — work from a current recipe for one of those rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the quantitiesThe original gives no weights at all, and "a piece of butter the size of a walnut" is usually glossed as somewhere between one and two tablespoons. Even setting the safety question aside, this is a note-to-self rather than a formula, written for a cook who already knew the dish.
Brains were cheap, perishable and therefore cooked close to the slaughterhouse, which is why nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks treat them as unremarkable household meat, usually parboiled and then fried, scrambled with eggs, or — as here — dropped into a sauce for the last minute or two so they stay soft rather than turning granular. The pairing with tomatoes reflects a shift in the same period: tinned and bottled tomatoes became reliably available in the 1880s and 1890s and quickly attached themselves to strong-flavoured cuts and organ meats. The brief instruction and the walnut-sized butter are typical of the genre, which assumed a reader who had watched someone else make the dish. Offal cookery of this kind was already in long decline in English-speaking home kitchens well before the BSE epidemic and the regulation that followed.