Clean the brains. Heat 1 tablespoonful of drippings in a pan; add the brains, 1 sliced onion, some parsley, salt and pepper. Let stew fifteen minutes. Thicken the sauce with butter and flour; let boil up. Serve hot with spinach and sprinkle all with chopped hard-boiled eggs.
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.
April 23 — No. 23
German
This is a straightforward offal braise of the kind that filled European household books, but brain is the one variety meat that modern food law has largely closed off. The problems are not with the cooking method.
- Species is not stated, and it mattersA dish labelled "German" in this period most often means calf's brain (Kalbshirn), though the recipe itself does not say. Bovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material in the EU, the UK and Canada, and in the United States brain from cattle aged 30 months or older is kept out of the food supply, because these are the tissues associated with BSE prions; sale for food is restricted or prohibited depending on jurisdiction and the age of the animal. A recipe that simply says "the brains" gives a modern cook no way to comply.
- Prions are not destroyed by cookingFifteen minutes in a covered pan, or fifteen hours, makes no difference to prion infectivity. Ordinary cooking temperatures, and even autoclaving at standard settings, do not reliably inactivate the agent behind variant CJD. This is the specific reason brain is treated differently from liver, kidney or heart.
- Sheep and goat brain carry their own restrictionsScrapie controls place the brain and spinal cord of older sheep and goats in the same restricted category in several jurisdictions. Substituting lamb does not solve the problem the recipe creates.
- "Clean the brains" is doing a great deal of workThe original assumes the cook knows to soak, peel away the membrane and blood vessels, and blanch before the final cooking. Skipping any of that was a real hazard even at the time for ordinary spoilage reasons, brain being among the most perishable things a butcher sold.
- If you want the dishUse a current, sourced recipe from a supplier operating under present-day inspection rules, and follow their guidance on species and handling. Do not scale up from this page.
- What the rest of the method tells youFor context only: "drippings" is rendered meat fat, usually beef or pork; the butter-and-flour thickening is added to the pan liquid at the end rather than started as a roux, though the recipe does not say whether the two are creamed together first.
Brain was standard eating across German-speaking Europe well into the twentieth century, most familiarly as gebackenes Hirn (crumbed and fried), Hirn mit Ei (scrambled with eggs) and stewed versions like this one, and it was prized for being cheap, quick to cook and mild enough for invalids and children — nineteenth-century medical advice often recommended it as easily digestible. Its appearance here reflects the ambition of the year-a-day "dishes of all nations" format, which set out to give home cooks one representative national dish at a time; a calf's head or a set of brains was then a routine butcher's item, and no author would have thought the choice adventurous. The regulatory picture changed only in the 1980s and 1990s, when BSE was identified in British cattle and central nervous tissue was reclassified as material to be kept out of the food chain.