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 › Sheep's Brains, Scalloped
Sheep's Brains, Scalloped
Soak the brains in cold salted water for an hour. Remove the skin, and pick away the fibres. Put the brains into boiling water in which vinegar and salt have been mixed, and let them boil quickly for ten minutes. Throw them into cold water for a few minutes, and drain them. Cut them into small pieces, and mix with them an onion or shallot finely minced, a few parsley leaves scalded and chopped small, a few drops of vinegar and anchovy essence, and a little pepper and salt. Dissolve a slice of fresh butter in a saucepan, throw in the brains, and shake the saucepan over the fire until they are done enough without being browned. Cleanse the scallop-shells, or small scallop-dishes will serve the same purpose, butter the insides rather thickly, and cover them with a layer of bread-crumbs. Distribute the minced brains and the gravy amongst them, and cover all with a layer of crumbs. Brown the surface in a quick oven or before the fire, and serve very hot. This favourite mode of cookery may be advantageously applied to cold meat, vegetables, mushrooms, fish, and shell-fish. Time to bake the scalloped brains, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient, one set of brains for two scallop-shells.
This entry is here as a document, not as a working recipe. The problem is the main ingredient, and nothing in the method addresses it.
- Why the brains are the issueBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents concentrate. In sheep the disease is scrapie; in cattle it is BSE, which is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, invariably fatal and untreatable. Prions are not proteins that cooking destroys: the ten-minute boil and the browning here have no effect on infectivity.
- It is not simply a matter of sourcingCattle brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material and are barred from the human food chain in the UK and EU, and the US prohibits cattle brain from older animals. For sheep, the skull including the brain and the spinal cord are specified risk material above a set age, so what a butcher may legally supply is tightly restricted.
- The soaking and skinning steps do nothing protectiveSalted water, vinegar, and picking away the membrane are all about texture and appearance; they have no bearing on prion infectivity.
- The last sentence is the usable partThe book itself notes that scalloping "may be advantageously applied to cold meat, vegetables, mushrooms, fish, and shell-fish." That is the technique worth keeping, and any current recipe for a buttered, crumbed scallop of fish or mushrooms will give you the same dish in spirit.
- Reading the original notes"Sufficient, one set of brains for two scallop-shells" means the pair from a single sheep filled two individual servings.
- Scallop-shellsReal scallop shells, saved, scrubbed and reused, were common baking vessels for small savoury dishes; the recipe itself allows that "small scallop-dishes will serve the same purpose".
Scalloping — mincing something cooked, seasoning it sharply, and baking it under crumbs in a shell — was one of the great economies of the Victorian kitchen, a way of turning small quantities and cheap cuts into a course that arrived at table looking composed. The entry closes by inviting the cook to substitute cold meat, fish or mushrooms. Brains were then an ordinary, inexpensive offal, sold with the head or separately, and appear throughout nineteenth-century English and French cookery books as a delicacy of texture, usually soaked, blanched in acidulated water, and served in a sharp sauce or crumbed. The seasoning here — shallot, scalded parsley, vinegar, anchovy essence — is characteristic of the period's approach to bland, soft foods. Enthusiasm for brains in Britain collapsed in the late twentieth century with the BSE epidemic and the regulations that followed, which is why a recipe that was once merely thrifty now reads as a historical curiosity.