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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Brains of Animals
THE Brains of animals consist largely of a fatty matter containing cholesterin, and lecithin, the latter element being comparatively rich in phosphorus. Dr. Salmon (in 1696) directed that "a ram's Brain fried, and a cake made of it with sheep suet, cinnamon, and nutmeg, is good against the lethargie, and other drowsie diseases." But Dr. Yeo now admonishes that "the large percentage of fat contained in the Brains of animals renders them difficult of use as food by weak stomachs." Nevertheless, ordinarily, owing to its soft consistency, the Brain is more readily digested than any other animal part; but, unfortunately, it is very imperfectly absorbed. 43 per cent of it being voided in the excrement from the bowels. Therefore, in spite of its easy digestibility, it cannot be regarded as a valuable food for invalids. Neither, as he supposes, is it in any sense specially fitted for 66 making Brains." "Some persons do fancy," said Lemery (1674), as an ancient writer has told, "that rabbit's Brains weaken the memory, because this animal cannot for a moment after retain in mind the toils laid for her, and that she had just escaped; but this conjecture being founded on a weak foundation, I shall not stop here, and go about to confute it."
To blanch (calf's) Brains, put them into a basin, with some cold, well-salted water to wash them; then strain, and rinse them in two or three other waters; put them into a stewpan, with a sliced onion, a small bunch of herbs, a few black and white peppercorns, and a teaspoonful of lemon-juice; bring them to the boil, then leave them in the liquid until cold; remove the outside of the Brains, and cut up the inside white part into small dice, and use them for the table. The calf's Brain is tasteless of itself, but palatable with a white sauce, and absolutely tender; when fried it evolves a very fine osmazome flavour, superior to that of any meat, or game; but the least over-frying is destructive of this flavour. Ox Brain is not eatable. Brain substance, or its medicinal principle-“ cerebrin"-got from the grey matter of calves', and sheeps' Brains, is used remedially by modern physicians against some forms of disease in the human brain. Concerning the dictum which has obtained a widespread belief as to the functions of the human brain, that "without phosphorus there is no thought," this is only true in the sense that the brain contains phosphorus as one of its constituents; and, unless we use the brain, thought, it would seem, is unthinkable. But the fact has never been shown that an increased supply of phosphorus in the food is especially favourable to mental effort. "It comes to this on the whole," says Dr. Hutchison, "that the digestibility of a food is of far greater concern to a brain-worker than its chemical composition." Furthermore, mental work influences the amount, and nature of the food which thereby becomes needed, in a different way from muscular labour. Brain work does not appreciably increase bodily waste at all, a fact which should be realized, and acted upon as regards the daily diet. "Mark this," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, "that I am going to say, for it is as good as a working-man's professional advice, and costs you nothing: It is better to lose a pint of blood from your veins than to have your nerves tapped. Nobody measures your nerve-force as it runs away, nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation." As to special Brain nutriments, they do not exist. Small, and rather frequent meals of easily-digested food make up the ideal to aim at, it being remembered that brain work is usually also sedentary work. The reduction in the diet for mental work should probably affect the starches, sweets, and fats, more than the animal foods, fish, fowl, meat, eggs, and milk.
BRANDY (See CORDIALS.)
The essay wrapped around this recipe is period nutritional theory, but the middle of it is a working procedure for blanching calf's brains. That procedure cannot be recommended today, and the reasons are specific to this tissue rather than to offal in general.
- The hazard is the tissue itself, not the methodBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy concentrates. The resulting human illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is untreatable and fatal, and prions are not destroyed by boiling, frying or ordinary domestic cooking. No handling change in this recipe addresses that.
- Calf brain is specified risk materialCalf brain is tightly controlled - From the BSE control measures of 1989 onwards, bovine brain and spinal tissue have been classed as specified risk material in the UK, the EU and elsewhere. The controls are age-based: in the EU it is the skull and brain of cattle over twelve months that must be removed from the food chain, so brain from a true calf is not banned everywhere, but it is heavily regulated and not casually available from a butcher in much of the world.
- Sheep and ram brains are not a substituteSheep and ram brains are not a straightforward substitute - Dr. Salmon's fried ram's brain and the "cerebrin" from sheep brains raise related questions: sheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and ovine central nervous tissue is controlled as risk material in many countries. Scrapie itself has never been shown to infect humans, but swapping species does not simply dispose of the problem.
- The cooking is also insufficient on ordinary groundsBringing the brains only to a boil and then leaving them to cool in their liquid holds a highly perishable, high-fat animal tissue for hours in the temperature range where Salmonella, Listeria and staphylococci multiply. Even setting prions aside, this is a poor procedure by any modern standard.
- "Ox Brain is not eatable"The author gives no reason for the dismissal; nothing in the passage suggests safety was the concern. It is worth noting chiefly for the coincidence that the adult bovine brain now understood to be the highest-risk item is the one this text already rejected.
- VocabularyOsmazome was an early nineteenth-century French term for the supposed savoury extractive principle of meat, the thing we would now attribute to amino acids and Maillard browning. Cholesterin is cholesterol; cerebrin was a crude brain-tissue extract sold as a nerve remedy and has no place in current medicine.
- If you want the dishCooks in countries where lamb or pork brains remain legally sold should follow a current, regulated recipe and their national food-safety guidance rather than this one. For the delicate fried texture the author is chasing, sweetbreads are often suggested as a substitute.
This entry comes from W. T. Fernie's Meals Medicinal, part of a wave of turn-of-the-century books that catalogued ordinary foods as if they were pharmacy stock, each with a chemical analysis and a verdict on the invalid's stomach. The passage is a good specimen of the argument the period was having about brain as food: Fernie quotes William Salmon from 1696 prescribing fried ram's brain against lethargy, and Lemery from 1674 on the folk notion that rabbit brains weaken the memory, then sets both against the newer authorities Yeo and Hutchison, who measure rather than moralise, Hutchison on the question of digestibility as against mere composition. Behind all of it sits the Victorian phosphorus theory, the widely repeated slogan that "without phosphorus there is no thought," which made brain, fish and eggs into supposed brain food and which Fernie is at pains to deflate. What the chapter could not anticipate is that the tissue it treats as merely fatty and poorly absorbed would, within a century, be identified as the specific carrier of a prion disease and made subject to controls on its sale, graded by the age and species of the animal.