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 Fry Beef Brains
Pour over the brains salt water, let them remain for an hour, changing the water to draw the blood out, then pour over them some boiling water and remove the skin. Beat up two eggs, and make a batter with a little flour, bread crumbs and crackers. Season with pepper and salt. Fry in hot lard.--Mrs. P.W.
This is a straightforward 19th-century fry-up, but the ingredient at its center is now restricted food material in much of the world. The notes below explain why, and what the original directions assume.
- Why brains are off the tableBovine central nervous tissue — brain and spinal cord — is classed as specified risk material because it is where the infectious agent of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) concentrates. In the United States the brains of cattle aged 30 months or older are prohibited from the human food supply, and the European Union and United Kingdom operate comparable bans.
- Cooking does not helpThe hazard is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. Prions survive frying, boiling, and temperatures far above anything a skillet reaches, so the usual reasoning about cooking meat thoroughly does not apply here. A current, regulated recipe should be used if you want an organ-meat dish.
- The soak and the skinThe hour in changed salted water and the scald to loosen the membrane are the standard historic preparation for any brain or sweetbread, and they are about appearance and texture rather than safety — they draw out blood so the finished pieces fry pale rather than mottled.
- The batter as writtenTwo beaten eggs with "a little flour, bread crumbs and crackers" is a single loose batter rather than the modern three-stage flour-egg-crumb breading. Crackers in this period would most likely be plain soda or water crackers, crushed and used as a coarser crumb, though the recipe does not specify.
- Lard and heat"Fry in hot lard" gives neither the depth of fat nor a temperature; period frying instructions of this kind cover everything from a filmed skillet to a deep pan of fat, and the cook was expected to judge the heat.
- No yield givenA beef brain weighs somewhere around a pound. The recipe specifies neither the number of servings nor any accompaniment.
Fried brains belonged to the ordinary economy of a household that butchered its own beef: nothing edible was wasted, and the soft organs — brains, sweetbreads, liver, kidneys — spoiled fastest and so were eaten first. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and first published in 1878, gathers contributions from named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, and this terse entry from "Mrs. P.W." is typical of the book's method: a technique passed between cooks who already knew what a batter should look like. Brains dressed this way, or with butter and lemon in the French manner, remained a familiar American dish into the twentieth century; their disappearance is recent, and followed the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and the regulations that came with it.