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 Stew Brains
To Stew Brains
Have them thoroughly soaked in salt water to get the blood out. Put them in a stewpan with water enough to cover them; boil half an hour, pour off the water, and add one teacup of cream or milk, salt, pepper, and butter the size of an egg. Boil well together for ten minutes, when put into the dish. Add one tablespoonful vinegar.--Mrs. P.W.
This is a straightforward offal preparation of a kind that was ordinary in nineteenth-century households, but brain is one of the few foods that regulation and food science have effectively removed from the home kitchen. The problems here are not about technique.
- Prion risk is the central issueBovine and ovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents at the highest concentration. Prions are not proteins that cooking denatures; boiling for half an hour, or for several hours, does not reduce infectivity in any meaningful way.
- The species is not statedThe recipe never says whose brains, and calf or hog brains, whichever came with the head, are the likely candidates. Bovine brain is now classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food supply above an age threshold that differs by jurisdiction (thirty months in the United States, twelve months in the EU and UK), which makes casual home sourcing of beef brain difficult.
- Soaking does nothing for the hazardThe salt-water soak is there to draw out blood and firm the tissue for handling. It is a cosmetic and textural step and has no bearing on pathogen or prion risk.
- Ordinary bacterial spoilage as wellBrain is very soft, highly perishable offal with a large surface area and no protective structure, and spoils quickly.
- If you want the dishSome jurisdictions still permit pork brain, and it is sold canned in parts of the American South. Anyone wanting to cook it should work from a current, regulated recipe with stated sourcing and handling rules rather than from this one.
- Reading the measurementsFor historical interest: a teacup in books of this period is conventionally reckoned at somewhere between four and six fluid ounces, and "butter the size of an egg" is about two ounces, or four tablespoons. The closing tablespoon of vinegar goes in after the stew is put into the dish, so it is a seasoning added off the heat rather than a cooking acid.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered recipes credited to some two hundred and fifty contributors, many signed only with initials as "Mrs. P.W." is here. That format tells you a good deal: these were working household formulas passed between women who already knew the basic method, which is why the recipe never says whose brains, or how many. In a period when a household bought or slaughtered a whole animal, the head came with it, and brains, sweetbreads, tripe and tongue had to be used quickly. Stewed brains in cream, and brains finished with a sharp note of vinegar, appear in English and French books of the same decades. The taste for it survived in the American South well into the twentieth century, in scrambled eggs with brains and in canned pork brains, before food-safety regulation following the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s largely ended the trade in bovine brain.