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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Brain Cakes
Soak and pick the brains, boil for a quarter of an hour, and blanch them. Pound them to a paste with a tea-spoonful of chopped sage, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of mace and cayenne, salt, pepper, and two well-beaten eggs. Make the paste into balls about the size of a florin; when flattened, dip them into egg and fine bread-crumb, and fry brown. They are appropriate as a garnish for "calf's head a la tortue."
This is a reading text, not a working one. The points below explain the terms and then the reasons the dish cannot be made today.
- Why it fails: the tissue itselfBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE prion concentrates. Prions are not proteins that cooking destroys; boiling, frying and ordinary sterilisation temperatures leave infectivity intact, so there is no time or temperature that makes this preparation safe.
- Why it fails: the lawBovine brain and spinal cord are controlled as specified risk material in the UK, the EU and the US, though the rules turn on the animal's age: in the EU the skull and brain become SRM at twelve months, in the US at thirty months. Brains from very young calves are therefore not banned outright everywhere, but they have largely disappeared from ordinary retail supply.
- Why it fails: the dish it garnishesThe recipe exists to accompany calf's head a la tortue, another preparation built on calf's head. Dishes of this family had already become uncommon in British kitchens by the mid-twentieth century, and the BSE controls removed the brain element from legitimate supply.
- A florinThe coin was two shillings and about 28 mm across, the size of the old pre-1992 British 10p and somewhat larger than a modern 10p or a US quarter (each about 24.5 mm). It tells you the cakes were small, flattened rounds, meant as a plate garnish rather than a portion.
- Blanching, in the older senseHere it probably does not mean a brief dip in boiling water. In period handling of brains the parboiled tissue was generally cooled in water so that membranes and blood vessels could be stripped away and the flesh firmed for pounding, though the recipe itself gives no detail.
- Mace and cayenneMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral than the seed itself; cayenne in this period meant a fine, fiery ground red pepper. The wording leaves it unclear whether the quarter-teaspoon covers both spices together or each separately.
- If you want the effectSmall pounded, egg-and-crumbed, fried garnish balls are a general Victorian technique applied to many forcemeats. Use a current recipe for a poultry or veal quenelle if you want something of the same kind on the plate.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a cook was expected to use every part of the animal and when calf's head, brains and sweetbreads were ordinary middle-class food rather than curiosities. Brain cakes are a garnish in the classical French manner filtered through an English kitchen: a la tortue, generally traced to a mock-turtle treatment of calf's head, was dressed with a clutter of small fried and glazed items, and pounded brains bound with egg made a cheap, delicate one. Offal of this kind stayed on British menus well into the twentieth century, and fried brains in crumbs were still a cafe dish in parts of Europe and the American South within living memory. Taste had already turned against such dishes in Britain before the recognition in the 1980s and 1990s of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and its link to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, after which central nervous tissue was removed from the human food chain by regulation. The page is worth reading as a record of how completely a food safety finding can close a door on a class of cookery.