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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Bullock's Brains
Lay some slices of bacon into a stewpan, with onions, carrots, chives, and parsley; blanch the brains in lukewarm water, and put them in with equal quantities of white wine and stock broth, seasoned with pepper and salt. Stew gently for half an hour, and send to table with fried parsley.
This is a nineteenth-century braise of calf's or bullock's brains, and it belongs to a period before the risks of bovine central nervous tissue were understood. The notes below explain why the dish is off the table rather than how to bring it up to date.
- Why it cannot be madeBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the highest infectivity in bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The prion responsible is not destroyed by half an hour of gentle stewing, nor by any domestic cooking temperature or duration; there is no treatment for the resulting variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Use a current recipe for something else.
- It is also largely illegalCattle brain, spinal cord and other specified risk material have been excluded from the human food chain in the UK since 1989 and across the EU from the late 1990s, with comparable restrictions in the United States introduced after 2003. Depending on the jurisdiction and the age of the animal, a butcher cannot legally supply the main ingredient of this dish.
- "Blanch in lukewarm water"Here this most likely means a soak in tepid water to draw out blood and loosen the membrane rather than a plunge into boiling water, though period usage of 'blanch' also covered scalding. It is worth knowing as a reading of the text, not as a step to follow.
- "Stock broth"This most likely means plain meat stock rather than a concentrated reduction. The recipe gives no quantities beyond specifying equal parts wine and stock, so the result is a braising liquor rather than a finished sauce.
- The bacon liningThe slices in the base of the stewpan line the pan rather than form part of the finished dish: they stop delicate flesh catching and add fat to the liquor.
- Fried parsleySprigs are dried thoroughly and dropped into hot fat for a few seconds only, until crisp and still green. It was the standard garnish for offal and fried fish in Victorian service and remains sound practice with other dishes.
Brains were ordinary butcher's meat in Britain and France for most of the nineteenth century, sold cheaply with the head and prized for their soft texture; Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later revision of the Dictionary of Cookery that first appeared in the mid-1870s, gives them a run of entries alongside palates, sweetbreads and calf's head. The white-wine-and-stock braise on a bed of bacon and root vegetables here is straightforwardly the classical braise, applied to a cut that needed protection from direct heat. What ended the tradition was not taste but epidemiology: the BSE epidemic in British cattle, recognised in 1986, and the identification of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans a decade later led to bans on specified bovine risk material that removed brains from butchers' counters altogether. The entry survives as a record of how thoroughly the nose-to-tail habits of a Victorian kitchen have been rewritten by a single pathogen.