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, STEWED (a good breakfast or side dish)
SHEEP'S BRAINS, STEWED (a good breakfast or side dish)
Take four or six fresh brains, soak them in salt and water for an hour, remove the skin, pick off the fibres, then put the brains into boiling water into which has been put when cold a dessert-spoonful of salt and a table-spoonful of vinegar. Let the brains boil quickly for ten minutes. Take them up without breaking, and put them into cold water. Take as many thin slices of bacon as there are brains. Put them into a saucepan, lay the brains upon them, pour over them as much stock or broth as will cover them, and add a bunch of parsley, a sprig of thyme, three young onions, two cloves, an inch or two of thin lemon-rind, and a little salt and cayenne. Cover the saucepan closely, and let its contents simmer gently until done enough. Put the pieces of bacon on a dish, and lay the brains upon them. Strain the liquor, thicken it with flour and butter, stir a table-spoonful of lemon-juice into it, and pour it over the meat. Garnish with sippets, and serve very hot. If liked, a tea-spoonful of anchovy essence and a glassful of claret may be added to the sauce. Time to boil the brains the second time, half an hour. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
This is a dish that can no longer be prepared, and the reasons are specific to the tissue it is built on rather than to any technique in the method.
- Prion disease is the barrierBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathies concentrate. Sheep carry scrapie, and the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s established that ruminant nervous tissue can carry agents fatal to humans, with no treatment and no reliable test on the plate.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not conventional pathogens. They are misfolded proteins that survive boiling, roasting, ordinary autoclaving and the household disinfectants used to clean up afterwards, so the ten-minute blanch and the half-hour simmer here have no bearing on the risk at all.
- It is also a legal matterBrain, spinal cord and skull from sheep and goats above a set age are classed as specified risk material in the United Kingdom and the European Union and must be removed and destroyed at slaughter. Brains from animals over that age cannot legally be supplied; only those from young lambs fall outside the restriction, so sourcing six brains as the recipe opens is heavily constrained.
- Cross-contamination in the kitchenThe instruction to soak, skin and pick off the fibres by hand means prolonged contact between the tissue and bowls, boards, knives and sink. This is exactly the handling that abattoir controls were written to prevent.
- If you want the dish behind the dishWhat is really being cooked here is a delicate white offal poached and then braised on bacon in a herb-scented broth, finished with a lemon and flour-and-butter sauce. Sweetbreads or a firm white fish take that treatment well, and a current recipe should be used for them.
- Reading the originalSippets are small triangles or fingers of fried or toasted bread used as a garnish and edging round the dish. "Probable cost, 2s" is two shillings, a Victorian pricing convention Cassell's uses throughout so a cook could budget a meal at a glance.
Cassell's places this among the breakfast and side dishes, which tells you how ordinary brains once were on a British table: cheap, quickly cooked, and available from butchers who broke down whole carcasses; they were also often recommended as invalid food. The two-stage treatment here, a hard boil in salted and acidulated water to firm the tissue and set it, then a gentle braise on bacon in flavoured stock, is close to the handling classic French cookery gives cervelles and to the method used for calf's sweetbreads. The claret and anchovy essence offered at the end are a characteristically nineteenth-century British flourish, the kind of savoury-and-wine lift also used with kidneys and steaks in the same period. The trade in offal of this sort continued until the BSE crisis of the late twentieth century, when the removal of ruminant brain and spinal cord from the food chain effectively ended a family of recipes.