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 › Entrées › Brains Breaded
Brains Breaded
Parboil brains and cook in muslin bag in boiling acidulated water one half hour. Drain. Cool and cut into four-inch pieces. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and lemon juice, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in hot fat. Serve with Piquante or Hollandaise Sauce.
This is a standard turn-of-the-century treatment of a cheap variety meat, and it cannot be reproduced safely today. The points below explain why the dish itself is the problem, not the technique.
- The hazard is the tissue, not the cookingBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE prion concentrates, and prions are not destroyed by parboiling, frying, or any temperature a domestic kitchen can reach. Thorough cooking, which neutralises ordinary bacterial risk, does nothing here.
- The disease it can carryVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form linked to consumption of BSE-infected tissue, is progressive, untreatable and fatal. There is no test a cook can perform and no safe handling procedure at home.
- Legal statusBrain and spinal cord from cattle above a set age are classified as specified risk material and barred from the human food supply in the United States, the United Kingdom, the EU and elsewhere. The age thresholds differ between jurisdictions, and sale below them is not uniformly prohibited, but the ingredient is tightly controlled and hard to obtain legally.
- Sheep and goat brains are not a workaroundScrapie belongs to the same family of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, though it has not been shown to transmit to humans, and ovine and caprine nervous tissue falls under specified-risk-material controls in a number of jurisdictions. Substituting species does not put you outside the regulated category.
- "Four-inch pieces" is almost certainly a misprint"Four-inch pieces" reads oddly -- a calf's brain is small, and pieces of that size would be most or all of it, so the figure may be a misprint. This is a guess, not a documented correction.
- What the muslin bag and acidulated water were forThe cloth held the soft lobes together during the simmer and the acid, usually vinegar or lemon juice, firmed the albumen and kept the tissue white. It is a handling technique, with no bearing on safety.
- If you want the dishThe breading and frying method, and the Piquante or Hollandaise service, belong to a whole family of crumbed and fried entrées. Use a current recipe built on an ingredient that is legal and safe to buy.
Brains were standard entrée material in American cookery of the 1900s: cheap, quick to cook, and prized for a delicacy of texture that the crumb-and-egg coating was meant to set off against a sharp sauce. Lowney's Cook Book, issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was a chocolate manufacturer's promotional volume that nonetheless ran to a full general cookbook, with entrées, soups and sauces standing alongside the confectionery chapters — a common publishing model of the era, when food companies bought respectability by putting out comprehensive household manuals. Recipes like this one disappeared from mainstream English-language cookbooks over the twentieth century, first through changing taste and squeamishness about offal, then decisively after the British BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s prompted regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to bar specified risk material, by species and age, from the food chain. The page survives now as a record of what a middle-class kitchen once considered ordinary.