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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Turtle Soup, Mock, Brain Balls For
Wash the brains in two or three waters, and free them from skin and fibre. Throw them into boiling water, and let them boil for ten minutes. Take them up, and put them into cold water for a minute or two. Afterwards drain them, and pound them in a mortar with a tea-spoonful of chopped sage, or a little savory, or lemon thyme, and pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Bind the mixture together with the yolk of an egg, make it up into small balls the size of a child's marble, dip these twice into beaten egg and bread-crumbs, and fry in hot fat till they are brightly browned. Drain them, and add them to the soup. Time, two or three minutes to fry the balls. Probable cost, 4d. for this quantity, exclusive of the brains. Sufficient, one brain ball to each guest.
This garnish belongs to the historical record rather than to any working kitchen. The points below explain what the recipe is doing and why it cannot be reproduced.
- The hazard is the brain itselfBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk material because they can carry the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy, linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prions are not destroyed by the ten-minute boil, by frying, or by any domestic cooking; they survive temperatures far above anything a kitchen reaches.
- Not a supply-chain questionSince the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 90s, removal and destruction of the skull and brain of cattle above a specified age (12 months in the EU and UK) has been mandatory as specified risk material, and imports were widely restricted. Bovine brain is in practice very hard to obtain as food in these markets.
- Other brains are not a substituteSheep and goat brains carry related transmissible encephalopathies and are restricted in many jurisdictions for the same reason. Pig brain avoids the prion issue but is a different product handled under its own rules; anyone wanting to cook offal balls should work from a current, sourced recipe rather than adapting this one.
- What the balls were forMock turtle soup, made from a calf's head, was garnished with small forcemeat balls standing in for the green fat and gelatinous morsels of real turtle. The brain balls, egg-and-crumbed and fried, supplied the rich soft interior that gave the imitation its credibility.
- Reading the costing"Probable cost, 4d." is fourpence in pre-decimal money, very roughly a couple of pounds today for the eggs, crumbs, herbs and frying fat. The figure is quoted "exclusive of the brains".
- Scale and yield"The size of a child's marble" suggests something around half an inch across, and the book allows one ball per guest: a garnish rather than a course. The double egging and crumbing would help keep a soft pounded mixture from bursting in the fat.
Mock turtle soup was one of the great Victorian economies: real green turtle, shipped live from the West Indies, was among the most expensive things on an English table, so cooks imitated its texture and gelatinous richness with a boiled calf's head, and imitated its garnishes with forcemeat. The dish is old enough to have entered the language, and by the time Lewis Carroll gave the Mock Turtle to Alice in 1865 the joke needed no explaining to a reading public that knew the soup from every hotel and club menu. Cassell's treats it as a set-piece with numerous subsidiary recipes, of which this is one, reflecting a kitchen economy in which a whole calf's head was bought and every part of it accounted for, including the brains that a modern butcher must remove and destroy as specified risk material once the animal is over the age threshold.