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 › Cookery › To Fry Brains
To Fry Brains
Soak the brains for several hours in weak salt water to get out the blood; drain and put them in a saucepan and pour very little boiling water on; simmer a few minutes. Handle them lightly, and arrange so as to form round cakes, without breaking. Pepper them and use very little salt; brains require very little salt. Have ready a beaten egg, and cover the top of the cakes with it, using a spoon to put it on. Sift over grated cracker and fry in hot lard; serve the other side the same way. Keep closely covered while frying.--Mrs.
This is a plain, competent nineteenth-century treatment of a variety meat, but the central ingredient is no longer one a home cook can simply buy and cook. The problem is the brain itself, not the method.
- Which brains this meansThe recipe does not say. In an 1879 Virginia kitchen the likely candidates were calf's or hog's brains, both common in Southern cookery. If calf's, the modern restrictions below apply directly.
- BSE and specified risk materialBovine brain and spinal cord are classified as specified risk material because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. In the United States and the EU, brain from cattle over a defined age is excluded from the human food supply outright, and calf brain is tightly restricted.
- Cooking does not helpThe infectious agent in prion disease is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. It survives simmering, frying, and temperatures far above anything a domestic stove reaches, so no adjustment to the method makes this safer.
- The brief simmer is not a kill step"pour very little boiling water on; simmer a few minutes" is there to firm the tissue enough to shape into cakes, not to cook it through, and the subsequent frying cannot be relied on to bring the interior of the cakes to a safe temperature. Brain is also a highly perishable tissue that spoils faster than muscle meat.
- Sheep and goat brainScrapie is the ovine equivalent, and brain from small ruminants is likewise regulated or barred in many jurisdictions. Substituting lamb brain does not resolve the issue.
- If you want to cook offalUse a current recipe for a variety meat that is legally and safely sold where you live, and buy it from a butcher who can tell you its source.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, treats brains as an unremarkable breakfast dish, which they were: a household that killed its own calf or hog used everything, and the soft organs had to be eaten within a day or two of slaughter. Brains fried in crumbs, brains scrambled with eggs, and brains with scrambled egg on toast appear across American and British cookery of the period, and calf's brains in black butter was standard restaurant fare in France well into the twentieth century. The "grated cracker" of the coating points to the common practice of grating dried crackers to do duty for breadcrumbs, though the recipe does not name a type. The dish's retreat from American tables owed something to changing taste and something to regulation: the BSE outbreak identified in British cattle in the mid-1980s led, over the following two decades, to rules that removed bovine brain and spinal cord from the food chain in Britain, the EU, and North America, while pork brains were never barred and remained on sale.