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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Calf's Brains in Batter
Parboil brains; cut in two-inch pieces. Cover with French Dressing. Let them stand one hour. Drain, dip in Fritter Batter, fry in hot fat. Serve with Tomato Sauce.
This entrée belongs to a era of offal cookery that ended abruptly in the 1980s and 90s. The notes below explain the specific hazard and decode the shorthand the book expects you to already know.
- Why this one is off the tableBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. Infection causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is invariably fatal and untreatable, and no domestic cooking step inactivates the prion. Parboiling and deep frying do nothing to it.
- The regulatory pictureSince the BSE controls of the late 1990s and 2000s, brain and spinal cord from cattle above a set age (30 months in the US, 12 months in the EU and UK) are classed as specified risk material and must be removed from the food chain. Brains from animals below those ages may still be sold in some jurisdictions, but supply is limited and heavily regulated, and a recipe of this kind is better read than cooked.
- "Parboil" in this book"Parboil" -- The book gives no detail beyond the word. Period practice was to soak brains in cold water, strip the membranes, then simmer briefly in acidulated water to firm the tissue enough to slice. The step is structural rather than culinary — raw brains are too soft to cut or to hold batter.
- French DressingIn this period this means plain oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together — no ketchup, no sugar, nothing pink. The hour-long stand is a marinade.
- Fritter Batter and Tomato SauceBoth are cross-references to other pages of Lowney's, in the usual style of period cookbooks; the batter and sauce recipes themselves are not reproduced here. Neither is unsafe, and both are still worth having for vegetables or fish.
- If you want the shape of the dishDeep-fried, marinated, batter-coated morsels served with a tomato sauce is a template that works with cauliflower, salsify or firm white fish. Use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
Calf's brains were an unremarkable entrée in American and European cooking for centuries — cheap, delicate, and slotted into menus alongside sweetbreads, tripe and kidneys as one of the "variety meats" a thrifty household was expected to use. Lowney's, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston in the early 1900s as a chocolate-maker's promotional cookbook, ranges well beyond confectionery into full household cookery, and the entrée chapter reflects the fashion of the period for small fried or sauced dishes served between fish and roast. The Frenchified treatment here, marinated in vinaigrette then battered and fried, is the standard cervelles en fritot of the professional repertoire, translated for a domestic kitchen. What ended the dish was not taste but epidemiology: the British BSE epidemic identified in 1986, and the link to variant CJD announced in 1996, led to bans on bovine brain and spinal cord in food and effectively removed a whole class of nineteenth-century recipes from practical use.