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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Calf's Brains
Beat up the brains with a little lemon-peel cut fine, a little nutmeg grated, a little mace beaten, thyme and parsley.
Shred fine the yolk of an egg, and dredge with flour. Fry in little flat cakes and lay on top of the baked head.
If for soup, mix in one-half the brains with the soup while the soup is boiling, and make the other in cakes and lay together with forcemeat balls in the soup.--Mrs. R.
This is an appendix to a dressed calf's head, and it cannot be reproduced today: bovine brain is prohibited material in the food supply of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. The notes below explain the specific problem and the archaic language, not how to proceed.
- Why it is bannedWhy it is restricted -- Brain and spinal cord from cattle are classed as specified risk material because they are the tissues that carry the infectious agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The controls introduced from the 1990s are age-based rather than absolute: in the EU and UK the skull, brain and spinal cord are specified risk material in bovine animals over twelve months, and in the United States over thirty months. Brains from a young calf fall outside those thresholds, and calf brains are still sold in some markets, though many butchers no longer handle them.
- Cooking does not helpThe agent is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. Frying to a firm cake, or boiling in soup, does not inactivate it, so no time or temperature adjustment removes the risk. Risk is understood to rise with the age of the animal, which is why the regulatory thresholds are set by age.
- If you want the effectThe garnish here is really a delicate herbed fritter set on the baked head. A current recipe using another organ meat, or a forcemeat of veal, will give you the same place on the plate. Sheep and goat brain is subject to scrapie-related controls above about twelve months of age in some jurisdictions, so check what your supplier can legally sell.
- Reading the recipe'Beat up' here most likely means working the brains to a paste rather than whipping them raw; recipes of this kind generally assume the brains were blanched along with the head, though this text does not say so. 'Mace beaten' is whole mace crushed in a mortar; no quantity is given beyond 'a little'.
- Shred fine the yolk of an eggThis is most likely a hard-boiled yolk pressed through a sieve, since a raw yolk cannot be shredded; it adds richness and colour. A modern reader might mistake it for raw egg.
- Forcemeat ballsThe soup version assumes the reader already knows the book's forcemeat recipe, which is not reproduced here. The instruction is a cross-reference, not a complete method.
- Mrs. R.Contributor initials are how this book credits its sources. No quantities or yield are given; the recipe reads as an appendix to a single dressed calf's head.
Calf's head was a prestige dish of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries precisely because it demanded labour and wasted nothing: the cheek and tongue were served whole or turtle-fashion, the bones made the broth, and the brains, too soft to slice, were bound with herbs and fried as a garnish laid back on the head. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (usually dated 1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, is full of this whole-animal thinking, and the mock-turtle tradition behind it is generally traced to English cookery of the mid-1700s, where a dressed calf's head stood in for the expensive imported sea turtle. Brains remained ordinary American and European eating well into the twentieth century, and their retreat owed something to a broader decline in offal eating and a great deal to the BSE epidemic that began in British cattle in the 1980s and led regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to restrict central nervous tissue in the food chain.