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.
Calves' Brains
When the brains are received drop at once in a bowl of cold water, changing it until all blood is drawn out and the brains look white. Carefully pull away as much of the covering membrane as possible. Place in a saucepan, add 1 teaspoonful of salt, I thin slice of onion, 1 sprig of parsley and boiling water to cover. Simmer very gently for twenty minutes, then drain and plunge in cold water if they are to receive a second cooking-as when breaded and fried.
When to be served with black butter put in a small saucepan 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, add a slight dash of cayenne and heat slowly; let it color until almost black, then add 2 tablespoonfuls of plain or tarragon vinegar. Draw to one side until the brains are cooked and keep hot.
When the brains are done drain them quickly, arrange on a hot platter, pour over them the black butter, sprinkle with a little chopped parsley and serve as quickly as possible as they are at their best when piping hot.
This page is here as a record of how a cheap cut was handled in the early twentieth century, not as something to cook. Bovine central nervous tissue is the single highest-risk material in the beef carcass, and the reasons are specific rather than general squeamishness.
- Why this one is differentBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE prion agent concentrates. Prions are not destroyed by the twenty-minute simmer described here, nor by frying, nor by any temperature a domestic kitchen reaches. Cooking is irrelevant to the hazard.
- Specified risk materialBrain and spinal cord from cattle above a set age are classed as specified risk material and kept out of the food chain in the UK, the EU and Canada. The UK's first specified bovine offal ban dates from 1989, with wider EU and North American rules following from 2000 onward; the age thresholds differ between tissues and between jurisdictions. In the United States, cattle brain from animals aged 30 months and over is prohibited. A butcher offering calves' brains today is working under a patchwork of rules that varies by country and by the age of the animal.
- The diseaseVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has a long incubation, no treatment and no survivors; diagnosis in life is difficult and definitive confirmation is generally post-mortem. The number of human cases has been small, but the case fatality rate is 100 per cent. That asymmetry is the whole argument.
- Cross-contaminationThe soaking, membrane-stripping and draining described here spread the tissue across bowls, boards and the sink. Prion material is not removed by ordinary washing-up; laboratories decontaminate with sustained caustic soda or autoclaving well beyond household practice.
- Not a general ban on offalLiver, kidney, heart and tongue carry none of this particular risk and are still worth cooking. The problem is nervous tissue specifically, not economy cuts.
- Black butter, for the recordBeurre noir is butter cooked past nut-brown and finished with vinegar. The pairing survives on other dishes -- skate wing is the usual modern partner -- and a current recipe should be used for those.
Brains were a standard cheap-protein entry in household manuals of this period, sitting in the meat chapter alongside tripe, sweetbreads and calf's head. Brains were inexpensive and were regarded as delicate rather than lowly: the classic French treatment, cervelle au beurre noir, appears in nineteenth-century French cookery and was carried into American and British books as a way of dressing up an inexpensive purchase. The instructions to soak until white and strip the membrane are the standard ones, and similar directions appear in Escoffier. That economy ended abruptly. The British BSE epidemic, identified in 1986 and linked to human variant CJD in 1996, led to the removal of bovine brain and spinal cord from the food supply across most of the Western world, and a long-established dish effectively disappeared inside a decade.