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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Calf's Brains and Tongue
Remove the skin and the fibres, and wash the brains in several waters. Boil them in salt and water, and drain and chop them. Put them in a saucepan with half a cupful of melted butter, a tea-spoonful of parsley which has been boiled and chopped, a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, and a little salt and cayenne pepper. Skin and trim the boiled tongue, place it in the middle of the dish, and pour the sauce round it. Time to boil the brains, a quarter of an hour. The brains of one head will serve for a tongue.
This dish cannot be reproduced safely, and the reasons are specific to the tissue it is built on rather than to any step in the method.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the infectious agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and there is no treatment or cure.
- Cooking does not helpThe prion responsible is not a bacterium or a virus and is not destroyed by ordinary cooking, boiling, or salting. A quarter of an hour in salted water, or any longer time, changes nothing about the risk.
- Why you cannot simply buy itWhy it is hard to buy -- Brain and spinal cord from cattle over a set age (12 months in the UK and EU) are classed as specified risk material and must be removed at slaughter and destroyed. Brains from younger calves fall outside that rule in some countries and are still sold there, but availability elsewhere is limited or non-existent.
- "The brains of one head"The original assumes a whole calf's head bought intact, split by the butcher, with brains, tongue and cheek meat all used from the one animal. That trade in whole heads has largely disappeared, through a combination of post-BSE regulation and falling demand.
- The tongueBoiled tongue is a separate and unproblematic piece of cookery, but this page gives no method for it at all - it assumes one already boiled. Work from a current recipe if you want tongue, and leave the sauce here alone.
- The sauce, for referenceHalf a cupful of melted butter is about 4 fl oz, and the parsley is boiled before chopping, as it is in a number of period butter sauces. Nothing in the seasoning is unusual; the carrier is the issue.
Cassell's belongs to the era when nothing off a carcass was wasted and a calf's head was a cheap, respectable purchase - Victorian and Edwardian cookery books devote pages to head, brains, palate, ears and tongue, as this entry does. Brains were prized for their softness and were commonly treated as a rich garnish or sauce base rather than a dish in their own right: chopped, bound with butter, sharpened with lemon and cayenne, and poured around something more substantial. The practice persisted in British and French kitchens well into the twentieth century; in Britain it was curtailed by the BSE epidemic in British cattle recognised in the mid-1980s and the identification of variant CJD in humans in 1996, after which bovine brain and spinal cord were removed from the human food chain by law, while calf brains remained in use in French cooking. Offal recipes of this kind now read as a record of how thoroughly an animal was once used, rather than as instructions.