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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To Dress Brains
Lay in salt and water, then either scramble like eggs, or beat the yolks of eggs with a little flour; dip the brains in and fry them.--Mrs. W.
This is a two-line reminder rather than a recipe, written for cooks who already knew what a set of brains looked like and how long it took to firm up. It cannot be followed safely today, and the reasons are specific to the ingredient rather than to the technique.
- Brains are restricted or banned offalBrains are restricted offal -- Bovine skull, brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material in the UK, the EU and many other jurisdictions once the animal is past a set age (12 months for the skull and brain in the EU/UK; 30 months in US rules), and material so classed is barred from the human food chain. The concern is the BSE prion, which is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
- Cooking does not make prions safeUnlike bacteria, prions are not proteins that denature at kitchen temperatures. Frying, scrambling or boiling brain tissue from an affected animal does not reduce the hazard, so no adjustment of time or heat in this recipe would address it.
- Lamb, goat and pork brains are not a workaroundLamb, goat and pork brains are not a straightforward workaround -- Sheep and goats carry scrapie, a related transmissible spongiform encephalopathy with no demonstrated transmission to humans, and their skulls and brains are nonetheless controlled above a set age in several countries. Pork brain has been implicated in an occupational neuropathy cluster among slaughterhouse workers. None of these is an unrestricted substitute for what Mrs. W. intended.
- "Lay in salt and water" is doing a lot of workContemporary cookbooks that spell the process out direct a cold soak to draw out blood, peeling off the enclosing membrane, and in many cases a brief poach to firm the tissue before frying. The original assumes some such handling and states none of it.
- No quantity, time or temperatureThere is no weight, no soaking time, no frying time and no doneness cue. Even setting the prion question aside, this is a memory aid for someone who had made the dish before, not a set of instructions.
- If you want the dishSweetbreads, which are thymus and pancreas rather than nervous tissue, give the same soft-set, egg-battered fried result and are not restricted. Follow a current recipe with stated soaking and cooking steps.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from a network of Virginia housewives; some entries carry full names, while others end only with an initial, as "Mrs. W." does. To dress, in the older sense used throughout the book, simply means to prepare and cook, not to sauce or garnish. Brains belonged to the ordinary economy of a household that butchered or bought whole animals and expected to use the head as well as the loin: calf's brains in particular were considered delicate, invalid-friendly food, and appear scrambled with egg or fried in batter in English, French and American cookbooks straight through the nineteenth century. They stayed on American menus well into the twentieth, most visibly as brains and eggs in the South, and faded through a combination of changing tastes and the BSE controls that followed the disease's identification in 1986, with UK measures beginning in 1989 and the American trade persisting until the BSE response of 2003-04.