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.
Calf's Brains
Beat the brains nicely, adding a little thyme, parsley, nutmeg and few drops of lemon juice. Mince the yolk of an egg and roll in flour. Make into small cakes and fry in hot fat.
This is a short, workaday fritter recipe of a kind that once appeared in every general cookbook, but the main ingredient is no longer legally or safely available in most of the world.
- Bovine brain is specified risk materialBovine brain is restricted material -- Since the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, brain and spinal cord from cattle have been classed as specified risk material and removed from the human food chain in the EU, the UK, Canada and the United States, though the rules are age-banded (over 12 months in the EU and UK, over 30 months in the US). Brains from very young calves are not covered everywhere, and are still sold in some markets, but supply is limited and heavily regulated.
- Cooking does not make it safeThe infectious agent in BSE is a misfolded prion protein, not a bacterium. It is not destroyed by frying, boiling, or any temperature a kitchen can reach, so the usual reasoning about cooking offal thoroughly does not apply here.
- The recipe omits the step every older cook assumedThe recipe omits a step older texts usually give -- Historic brain recipes commonly begin with soaking in several changes of cold water (sometimes salted or acidulated), peeling away the membrane and blood vessels, and a preliminary blanch. This text appears to take that as read, which is one reason it cannot simply be followed as printed.
- "Beat the brains nicely"Most likely means work to a smooth paste rather than whisk; older usage of "beat" could cover pounding in a mortar as well as beating with a fork.
- "Mince the yolk of an egg""Mince" implies a hard-boiled yolk chopped fine, most likely acting as a binder and drier; the recipe does not state this, and it is an inference from the wording.
- If you want the dishSweetbreads and other permitted offal are prepared in a very similar way and are still sold; use a current recipe from a reliable modern source rather than adapting this one.
Brains were standard cheap protein in the era of whole-carcass butchery: a calf yielded a set of brains that spoiled fast and so were sold off quickly and cooked simply, usually crumbed and fried, dressed with black butter, or made into little cakes as here. Their presence in a general household book like this one signals a period when "Meats" meant the entire animal, and when a cook was expected to know without being told how to soak and skin an organ before it went near the pan \— hence the brevity of the instructions. The dish had largely faded from English-language cookbooks by the late twentieth century, part of a long decline in offal eating that was already well under way before BSE and the resulting specified-risk-material restrictions further limited the ingredient's availability; sweetbreads and tongue fared better than brains.