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.
Brains Omelet
Prepare the brains in the same manner as for frying, only after having been boiled, cut in pieces like oysters and throw the pieces in the eggs which have been prepared for omelet. Cook in the usual manner, not forgetting salt and pepper.
A one-line recipe that assumes you have already read the book's directions for fried brains, and that you keep brains in the house. The hinge is the preliminary cooking: brains must be soaked, peeled and firmed in liquid before they go anywhere near the eggs, or they will collapse into grey paste in the pan.
- "Prepare in the same manner as for frying"That means soaking in several changes of cold water, ideally an hour or two, until the water runs clear, then peeling away the thin outer membrane and any clinging blood vessels. Skipping the soak leaves a bloody, faintly metallic taste.
- "Boiled" means poachedBring salted water with a splash of vinegar or lemon juice to a bare simmer and hold the brains in it 12-15 minutes, until firm enough to slice. A true rolling boil breaks them up. Cool them before cutting.
- "Pieces like oysters"A useful visual: lobes cut into rough chunks about an inch across and half an inch thick, the size and heft of a shucked oyster. Smaller than that and they disappear into the egg.
- Sourcing, and one thing to avoidLamb and pork brains are the ones still sold by butchers, usually to order and frozen. Cattle brain is classed as specified risk material and kept out of the food supply because of BSE -- in the US from animals 30 months and older, in the EU and UK from animals over 12 months. The veal and beef brains this book took for granted are effectively not an option, and no home preparation addresses that risk, since cooking does not destroy prions.
- Proportions and yieldOne set of lamb brains, roughly 4-5 oz cooked, suits a three- or four-egg omelet and serves one generously or two modestly. More filling than that and the omelet will not hold.
- Cooking "in the usual manner"Fold the drained, dry pieces into the beaten eggs and cook in butter over moderate heat in an 8-inch pan, drawing the set edges inward. The brains are already cooked; they only need warming through, so pull the omelet while the centre is still soft.
- SeasoningThe instruction not to forget salt and pepper is not idle. Brains are extremely mild and go flat without generous salt; lemon or chopped parsley are common accompaniments, though the recipe itself calls for neither.
Brains were an ordinary, cheap butcher's item in the period and turn up throughout American and European cookbooks of the era, usually fried in crumbs, scrambled with eggs, or served with black butter in the French manner (cervelles au beurre noir). The comparison to oysters here is telling: soft, pale, faintly sweet organ meats were routinely described against oysters, then still an everyday food, and the pairing of brains with eggs is a natural one since both set gently and taste of little but richness. This book's telegraphic style, sending the reader back to an earlier entry rather than repeating the steps, is typical of turn-of-the-century household manuals written for cooks who already knew how to dress offal. Their near-total disappearance from American home cooking is a 20th-century development, driven first by changing tastes and later, for beef brain specifically, by BSE controls he 1989 the UK bovine offal ban to the US specified-risk-material rules of 2003-04.