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.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › Forcemeat Balls, Brain
Forcemeat Balls, Brain
Clean and soak the brains in lukewarm water for three hours, then boil. When cold, pound them in a mortar with a little flour, some chopped parsley, salt, and pepper. Bind with raw egg, and make into small balls. Fry a light brown, and drop them into a tureen. Time, ten minutes to boil.
This is a garnish for calf's head soup, and the ingredient at its centre is one that modern food safety has closed the door on. The notes below explain what has changed rather than how to proceed.
- The hinge is the tissue itselfBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents concentrate. Nothing in the method — soaking, boiling, pounding, frying — addresses that, because the infectious agent is a misfolded protein rather than a microbe.
- Prions survive cookingOrdinary kitchen heat, and indeed autoclaving at temperatures no domestic kitchen reaches, does not reliably inactivate prions. The ten-minute boil in the original was never intended as a safety step and would not function as one.
- Bovine brain is specified risk materialFollowing the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, the brain and spinal cord of cattle above a specified age were classified as specified risk material in the UK, the EU and elsewhere, and their removal from the food chain is mandatory. The rules vary by jurisdiction and by the age of the animal, so availability differs from place to place; where brain can still be bought legally, the underlying risk is unchanged.
- Variant CJD has no treatmentThe human disease linked to dietary exposure, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, has an incubation period measured in years and is invariably fatal. This is why the risk is treated as unacceptable rather than merely managed.
- Other brains are not a substituteSheep and goat brain carries scrapie-family concerns of its own, and pork brain has been associated with other neurological illness in workers handling it. Swapping the species does not make this recipe safe.
- If you want the garnishForcemeat balls for a clear soup are perfectly achievable from other ingredients, but use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
Cassell's places this among the small forcemeats — the pounded, bound, poached or fried garnishes that a Victorian kitchen produced by the dozen to finish a soup or ragout. Brain balls are usually associated with the calf's head repertoire: when a cook dressed a head for mock turtle soup she had the brains as a by-product, and thrift as much as taste turned them into a garnish for the tureen. The technique is the standard one of the period, a mortar and pestle doing the work a food processor does now, with raw egg as the only binder and flour to firm the paste. Offal of this kind was everyday eating in Britain well into the twentieth century, and brain is often said to have lingered on hospital and nursery menus as a supposedly digestible food. Its consumption was already in long decline before the 1980s; the BSE epidemic and the regulations that followed accelerated and then legally enforced that decline, removing cattle brain and spinal cord from the food chain outright.