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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Rissoles of Calves' Brains
Take two sets of brains; let them soak for some time in warm water; skim them carefully, and boil them a quarter of an hour in salt and water; let them drain; then fry them in four ounces of butter. When they have lost their fluidity, sprinkle them with a spoonful of flour, fry them again a little, and pour over as much broth as will convert them into a thickish fluid; beat up the yolks of three eggs and add to it, that it may become firm and thick; season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg; and lastly, add two ounces of beef marrow chopped fine, and set it aside to get cold. Roll out puff-paste, stamp it in forms with a cutter, rub the edges with yolk of egg, put a table-spoonful of force-meat in the centre; lay a piece of the same-sized paste over, pinch down the edges in the shape of a half-moon or any other shape you may fancy; dip them in egg beaten up, sprinkle them thickly with bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot lard. Serve them quite hot; when you take them out of the pan, throw a handful of fresh-picked parsley into the hot lard; stir it about gently, and when it ceases crackling take it out, at which moment it will be of a fine green and crisp; sprinkle it with salt, and strew it over the rissoles.
The technique here — a thick egg-bound forcemeat sealed in pastry and deep fried — is sound, but the filling itself is the problem, and it cannot be made safely from the specified material.
- Why this one failsBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials: they are the tissues that carry the greatest load of infectious prion in an animal with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Prions are not destroyed by the quarter-hour boil, the frying, or any domestic cooking temperature.
- The diseaseConsumption of BSE-infected nervous tissue is the accepted route for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. It is invariably fatal, has no treatment, and can incubate for many years after exposure.
- Not merely a matter of sourcingIn the UK, EU and many other jurisdictions the brain and spinal cord of cattle above a specified age are legally classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain. Calf brain from young animals is permitted in some countries and banned in others; the regulation, not the recipe, governs.
- Beef marrow, separatelyThe two ounces of chopped marrow are also from a bovine source. The recipe does not say which bone; marrow from the vertebral column of older cattle falls under the same restrictions, while marrow from long bones is a different matter. Either way it does not rescue the dish.
- If you want the dishFried pastry rissoles with a thick egg-bound forcemeat are worth making with a current recipe and a different filling. Follow one written for the ingredient you intend to use rather than adapting this.
Recipes for brains belong to a tradition in which Victorian and Edwardian kitchens treated offal as a matter of thrift and refinement at once: nothing from a carcass was wasted, and the soft, mild organs were thought suitable for invalids and for delicate entrées. Rissole comes from the Old French roussole, from a root meaning to redden or brown — the name describes the frying, not the filling. The fried parsley finish, thrown into the fat for the few seconds until it stops crackling, is a standard nineteenth-century garnish for anything served from the frying pan. The dish gradually fell out of favour in British cooking, though brains were still cooked here into the later twentieth century, and the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s made the central ingredient a regulated risk material rather than a bargain at the butcher's.