Clean and stew the brains with ½ cup of vinegar, 1 sliced onion, salt and pepper. Add a tablespoonful of brown sugar, ½ cup of raisins. Let stew until tender. Remove the brains to a platter; add a lump of butter and a tablespoonful of molasses to the sauce; boil up and pour over the brains. Serve cold; garnish with lemon slices.
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.
The cooking here is simple sweet-and-sour braising, but the central ingredient is the problem: brains are no longer an ordinary market item, and in the case of cattle they are a regulated material rather than a food.
- Why this one is off the tableBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they are the tissues that carry the BSE agent, linked to variant CJD in humans. In the United States the brains of cattle 30 months and older are prohibited from the food supply, and in the EU and UK the skull and brain of cattle over 12 months are classed as specified risk material and kept out of the food chain. No ordinary cooking time or temperature inactivates a prion.
- The recipe names no animalA cook of this period writing "the brains" most often meant calf, though lamb and pork brains were also sold. Neither species nor quantity is stated here.
- Handling risk beyond prionsBrain is a fatty, highly perishable offal that spoils faster than muscle meat. Period cookbooks commonly directed a soak in several changes of cold water to draw the blood and the stripping of the membrane; this recipe says only "clean," with no further detail.
- Served coldThe dish is finished, cooled and held before serving, which in a modern kitchen means a cooked high-protein food sitting at room temperature. The vinegar in the sauce should not be relied on as a preservative.
- If you want the flavourThe vinegar, brown sugar, raisin and molasses sauce is the interesting part of the recipe and belongs to a whole family of Ashkenazi sweet-sour braises. Use a current recipe for one of those, built on a cut of meat you can actually buy.
The sweet-and-sour register here — vinegar sharpened with brown sugar, molasses and raisins, onion for depth, lemon at the table — is the signature of Ashkenazi zis un zoyer cooking, the same treatment given to pot roast, tongue, carp and cabbage across Poland, Lithuania and the German lands, and carried into American Jewish kitchens by the great migration of the 1880s to 1910s. Offal was central to that cooking for the plain reason that it was cheap: brains, tongue, lung, spleen and feet cost a fraction of a roasting cut, and a sweet-sour sauce made a mild, soft, fatty item into something with an edge. Serving it cold on a platter with lemon slices may reflect the practice of cooking ahead for the Sabbath, though the recipe itself says nothing about when it was to be eaten. The book runs one recipe a day, each attached to a nation — here "Jewish" is treated as a national cuisine alongside Austrian and French, which tells you more about how American cookbook publishers of the period sorted the world than about the range of Jewish cooking.