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, Fried
Wash the brains, pick them clean, and let them lie in cold water for an hour. Boil them in water with a little vinegar for ten minutes, cool, and cut them into slices. Drain and dip them into a batter made with two table-spoonfuls of baked flour, two eggs, and a quarter of a pint of cream; this batter should be well beaten for fifteen minutes before it is used. Half fill an iron saucepan with frying fat, make this hot, then fry each piece, well dipped in batter, till it is a pale brown colour. Send them to table with a bunch of fried parsley in the centre of the dish, and the slices of brains round it. They should be served very hot. Time, fifteen minutes to fry.
This dish belongs to the historical record rather than the kitchen. The reasons are specific to the tissue involved, not to the technique.
- The tissue is the problemBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. Cooking does not destroy it: the infectious agent is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium, and it survives frying, boiling and ordinary sterilisation temperatures. The ten-minute pre-boil and the fifteen minutes in hot fat give no protection whatever.
- Why it is banned, not merely discouragedWhy it is regulated, not merely discouraged -- Following the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, bovine brain and spinal cord were designated specified risk material and removed from the human food chain in the UK and the EU, with comparable controls elsewhere. The thresholds turn on the age of the animal, so what may legally be sold varies by jurisdiction; in any case there is no home preparation that makes infected tissue safe.
- Age of the animal is not a workaroundCalf brains were prized precisely because the animal was young, and rules in some jurisdictions treat cattle under a set age differently. That is a matter of regulated slaughterhouse controls and testing, not something a domestic cook can verify or rely on.
- Baked flourA period term worth knowing when reading other recipes in this book: flour dried in a slow oven until it loses moisture and takes on a faint colour. It was used to make batters and sauces less pasty and to keep them from going lumpy.
- A quarter of a pint of creamIn an English book of this date that is a gill, about 5 fl oz or a little over half a US cup. The fifteen minutes of beating is not a misprint; the likely purpose is to work air into the batter, the eggs doing the lifting.
- If you want the dishFried parsley with a crisp battered centre is a Victorian serving idea that survives on its own terms; use a current recipe with a different main ingredient. Do not substitute another animal's brain on the assumption that the risk is confined to cattle.
Cassell's gives brains a place among the offal dishes a nineteenth-century household was expected to use. Brains, sweetbreads, tongue and tripe were familiar rather than novel items on the middle-class table, valued for their softness and for the way they took to a batter or a rich sauce — cervelles au beurre noir was a French restaurant standard, and English cookery books carried their own plainer versions. The instruction to soak in cold water and then blanch with vinegar is the classic preparation: the soak draws out blood, the acidulated water firms the delicate tissue enough to slice it. What ended the dish in Britain was not taste but epidemiology. The link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, announced in 1996, led to the removal of bovine brain and spinal cord from the food supply, and a family of long-established recipes became effectively unmakeable within a decade.