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 › Entrees › Croquettes of Calf's Brains
Croquettes of Calf's Brains
1 pair calf's brains 1 small sweetbread 1 can mushrooms 1/2 cup boiled rice 1 cup White Sauce No. 3 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Parboil the sweetbread and brains, chop very fine with a can of mushrooms, combine the rice and white sauce; cool and shape into small rolls. Roll in fine crumbs, egg and crumb again, and fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper and serve.
This is a period record rather than a working recipe. The central ingredient is a specified risk material that cannot be handled safely in a home kitchen.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the infectious prion of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the agent behind variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and has no treatment.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not conventional pathogens. They are misfolded proteins that survive parboiling, deep frying, and in laboratory conditions temperatures and chemical treatments far beyond anything a kitchen can produce. Neither the parboil nor the fat bath in this recipe reduces the risk.
- It is no longer legal food in much of the worldUnder BSE controls introduced from 1989 in the United Kingdom and through the late 1990s and early 2000s in the European Union and the United States, brain and spinal tissue from cattle above a set age have been designated specified risk materials and excluded from the human food supply. A butcher who offers calf's brains today is working under restrictions that did not exist when this book was printed.
- The sweetbread is a separate matterThymus and pancreas sweetbreads are not specified risk materials and are still sold, but they are highly perishable offal that was traditionally bought and cooked the same day. That is not a reason to attempt this dish, which cannot be made without the brains.
- If you want the shape of the dishThe technique here, a cooked filling bound with a thick white sauce, cooled firm, breaded twice and deep fried, is the standard croquette method, applied equally to chicken, veal and fish. Use a current recipe for one of those instead.
Calf's brains were once ordinary marketing, cheap, delicate in flavour, and prized precisely for the soft texture that made them easy to bind into croquettes and timbales. American cookbooks of the period, this one included, ran long entree sections built on the French repertoire of organ meats stretched with rice, breadcrumbs and a flour-thickened sauce. The whole class of brain dishes vanished from Western home cooking in two stages, first as offal fell out of middle-class fashion after the Second World War, and then decisively after the BSE epidemic in British cattle in the 1980s and 1990s established the link between nervous-system tissue and variant CJD, after which regulators removed these cuts from the food chain outright.