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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Brains, Sheep's, Fricasseed
Boil two sets of sheep's brains in slightly salted water for ten minutes; when cold slice each piece, sprinkle with chopped ham and parsley, and dredge with flour; season with pepper and salt, and dip in beaten egg; cover over with fine crumbs, and fry in boiling fat for eight minutes; then lay the brains on thin slices of fried bread, and garnish with fried bacon.
This is a recipe, but it is one that belongs to the reading shelf rather than the stove. The problem is the main ingredient itself, and no change of method addresses it.
- Prions are not destroyed by cookingTransmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents are misfolded proteins, not bacteria. Ten minutes at a boil followed by eight minutes in hot fat leaves them intact; they survive temperatures and treatments far beyond anything a kitchen can produce.
- Why brain specificallyCentral nervous system tissue carries by far the highest infectious load in an affected animal. Brain, spinal cord and dorsal root ganglia are the classic specified risk materials, which is why they were the first tissues to be removed from the food chain.
- Sheep as well as cattleScrapie is the sheep and goat TSE and has been recognised in Britain for centuries. It has never been shown to pass to humans, but the discovery that BSE could do so is precisely why regulators stopped treating ruminant brain as an ordinary offal.
- LegalityIn the UK and the EU, the skull including the brain, and the spinal cord, of sheep and goats over twelve months of age are classed as specified risk material and may not be sold for human consumption; comparable controls exist in a number of other jurisdictions. Younger animals fall outside the rule, so the tissue is not universally banned, but it is far harder to obtain lawfully than it was.
- No safe version is offered hereThere is no adjustment of time, temperature or sourcing that makes this dish safe to reproduce, and none is given. If you want a crumbed and fried offal dish of the same character, work from a current recipe using a permitted cut.
- On the title"Fricasseed" is loose here. Nothing is stewed in sauce; the brains are parboiled, sliced, breaded and deep fried, closer to what a later cook would call crumbed fritters.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century economy cookery, sold cheaply with the head and valued for their soft, almost custard-like texture. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical household reference of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, catalogues them alongside every other part of the sheep, and the parboil-slice-crumb-fry sequence here is the treatment commonly given to delicate items such as sweetbreads and cold cooked fish: firm the item first, then armour it in egg and crumb so it can meet hot fat. Brains remained ordinary butcher's stock across Britain, France and the United States well into the twentieth century. Consumption of offal was already declining by the later twentieth century, but what removed ruminant brain from the English-speaking kitchen decisively was the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and the specified risk material controls that followed. Recipes like this one survive as a record of how completely a common ingredient can disappear inside a single generation.