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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Scalloped Brains
Parboil brains; sprinkle with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Cut in inch pieces. Arrange in layers in buttered baking dish, alternating with Tomato Sauce. Cover with buttered and seasoned cracker crumbs and serve with chopped pickles.
This is a page to read rather than cook. The problem is not technique but the raw material itself, and no adjustment of times or temperatures addresses it.
- The tissue is the hazardBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the infectious prion of bovine spongiform encephalopathy concentrates. Prions are not destroyed by parboiling, baking, or any temperature a kitchen can reach; unlike bacteria, they are not living organisms that cooking can kill.
- Why it is not soldWhy it is hard to find -- Following the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, brain, spinal cord and other specified risk materials from cattle over a set age (30 months in the US, 12 months in the EU) were banned from the human food supply in the US, the UK, the EU and elsewhere. Beef brain largely disappeared from butchers' counters as a result, though tissue from young cattle is not banned everywhere, and these restrictions are a large part of why recipes like this dropped out of cookbooks.
- Not solved by switching animalsSheep and goats carry scrapie, a related prion disease, and their nervous tissue is subject to similar restrictions. Substituting another species does not make the dish as written safe.
- The parboil is not a safety stepIn this recipe parboiling serves to firm the tissue so it can be cut into cubes without collapsing, exactly as with sweetbreads. It was never intended as, and does not function as, a decontamination step.
- If you want the structure of the dishThe layering with tomato sauce, the buttered cracker crumbs and the chopped pickle garnish are the standard American scalloped-entree formula of the period, and they work with any firm cooked filling. Use a current recipe for whatever you put inside.
- Reading the instructions"Buttered crumbs" means cracker crumbs tossed with melted butter before they go on top, not a buttered dish (the dish is buttered separately). Lowney's, like many books of its date, gives no oven temperature, no time and no yield, on the assumption that the cook already knew how a scallop was finished.
Brains were an ordinary, cheap entree in American and European cooking well into the twentieth century, sold alongside sweetbreads, tripe and kidneys as part of the offal trade that kept nothing from a carcass unused. They were prized for a soft, almost custard-like texture, and were commonly parboiled to firm them, then breaded and fried, scrambled with eggs, or -- as here -- baked in layers under crumbs, a treatment applied indiscriminately in this period to oysters, potatoes, fish and salsify. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company as a general-purpose household manual with a chocolate chapter attached, so its entree section reflects mainstream turn-of-the-century American practice rather than anything specialised. The dish disappeared from ordinary cooking not through changing taste alone but through regulation: the identification of BSE in British cattle in 1986, and the recognition of its transmissibility to humans in the mid-1990s, brought heavy restrictions on the trade in bovine nervous tissue for food, though beef brain remains legally sold in parts of the world.