Clean and boil the brains in salted water; add 1 onion sliced; let cook ten minutes. Remove the brains and mash up well with 1 tablespoonful of butter, some bread-crumbs and parsley chopped, salt and pepper to taste; add 2 eggs. Mix together and fry in deep hot lard by the tablespoonful until brown. Serve with tomato-sauce.
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 technique here — parboil, mash with egg and crumbs, fry in spoonfuls — is ordinary croquette practice, but the main ingredient is the problem. Brains are the one offal that food law in most of the world now treats separately from the rest of the carcass.
- Bovine brain is a prohibited tissueBovine brain is a controlled tissue -- Brain and spinal cord from cattle are classed as specified risk material because they can carry the infective agent of BSE, and the prion associated with variant CJD in people is not destroyed by boiling, frying, or any temperature a kitchen can reach. In the EU and the UK the skull and brain of cattle over 12 months of age are excluded from the human food chain; Canada draws the line at 30 months; US rules bar brain from cattle 30 months and older and from any animal not passed for slaughter. A recipe that says only "the brains" gives you no way to know what you are buying.
- No species, no quantityThe original names neither the animal nor the weight — the amount of butter, crumbs and egg implies roughly one calf's brain, but that is inference. Sheep are also a scrapie species, and brains are highly perishable; older recipes routinely call for soaking and prompt use, the soaking usually being described as a way to draw out blood and loosen the membrane.
- Ten minutes is not a pasteurising stepSimmering in salted water for ten minutes sets the surface and firms the tissue enough to mash; it does not bring the interior of a dense organ reliably to temperature, and the frying that follows is brief and browns the outside of a tablespoon-sized fritter. Ordinary bacterial risk aside, no part of this method addresses the prion issue at all.
- If you want the dishFried brain fritters are still eaten in parts of central Europe and Italy, generally made now from pork brain, which is not subject to the TSE controls that apply to cattle and sheep. Work from a present-day recipe and a butcher who can tell you the species and the inspection status, not from this page.
- What the rest of the method tells you"Deep hot lard" is a straightforward deep-fry, and the tomato sauce is the plain cooked sauce of the period rather than anything Italian-American. Both are worth borrowing for other croquettes — the binder of butter, crumbs, parsley and two eggs would suit a similar bulk of cooked fish or poultry, though the recipe gives no quantities to scale from.
Gebackenes Hirn — brains breaded or battered and fried, served with a sharp or acid accompaniment — was a standard cheap Bavarian and Austrian dish well into the twentieth century, part of a wider central European habit of using every part of a slaughtered animal while it was fresh. Brains appear constantly in nineteenth-century and Edwardian cookbooks, English and American alike, usually as a supper dish or an invalid's food, on the theory that they were delicate and easily digested. A calendar collection like this one, offering a different nation's dish for each day of the year, treats them as unremarkable; the fact that the recipe does not bother to say whose brains, or how many, is a fair measure of how routine the ingredient was. The change since then is regulatory rather than culinary: the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in the mid-1980s led governments through the 1990s and 2000s to remove brain and spinal cord from the food supply, and a dish that once needed no explanation is now largely off the table.