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.
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Baked Brains
Prepare brain of an ox by washing and skimming it, and then steep it on back of range for 1 hour. Rub it with flour and salt, lay on it bits of Crisco, and set in oven, having added water to dish in which it is to bake. Bake it 1 hour, basting it often, and serve with mushroom sauce. Onion sauce may be substituted for the mushroom sauce.
This is a specified-risk-material dish, and no adjustment of method makes it sound. The notes below explain what the instructions assume and why the central ingredient is off the table.
- Why the brain is the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the highest load of the misfolded prion protein responsible for BSE. Prions are not destroyed by an hour in the oven, by long steeping, or by any temperature a domestic kitchen reaches; ordinary cooking has no effect on infectivity.
- The regulatory positionSince the BSE outbreaks of the late 1980s and 1990s, brain and spinal cord from cattle over a set age have been classed as specified risk material and banned from the human food chain in the UK, the EU, the US and elsewhere. In those jurisdictions an ox brain is not an ingredient you can legally buy.
- "Ox" is not a euphemismIn nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery writing ox generally denotes mature beef cattle rather than calf. Age matters here: older animals carry the greater risk, which is why the regulations key on the age of the carcass. Substituting calf brain does not resolve the problem, as the prion issue is a cattle issue regardless of age in many jurisdictions.
- Skimming and steeping"Washing and skimming" most likely means soaking in cold water and stripping the outer membrane and blood vessels, and the hour on the back of the range would have been a spot of gentle, below-boiling heat used to firm the tissue before baking. Both are handling steps, not decontamination steps, and neither reduces prion risk.
- CriscoThe hydrogenated vegetable shortening dates the recipe to 1911 or later and marks this as a book courting the new industrial fats. It appears here in place of the butter or beef dripping an older cookbook would have specified.
- If you want the dishNothing in the method is exotic: it is a braise-and-bake with a pan sauce. Use a current recipe built around a different protein, and treat this page as a document rather than a set of instructions.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century economy cooking, sold cheap from the butcher and treated much like sweetbreads: soaked, blanched, then fried in crumbs, scrambled with eggs, or baked as here with a mushroom or onion sauce to carry the mildness. They were understood as a soft, delicate protein, a light supper or breakfast dish rather than a joint of meat. That tradition, found across Britain, France and the American South, largely ended in Anglophone kitchens after the BSE crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s and the regulations on specified risk material that followed. Recipes like this one survive as a reminder of how completely a food can disappear from a cuisine within a single generation.