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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Meats (Water wash and cleanse)
the water; wash and cleanse the head thoroughly. Take out the brains; remove all the skin and blood; tie them in a piece of cheesecloth and put them with the head into a large kettle of boiling water. Add salt and boil the head for about two hours, or until the jaw bone can be twisted out of the meat. The brains will be 0 10 12 6 7 3 9 I 5 8 10 7 1. Neck 6. Ribs 2 Chuck 7. Loin 3. Shoulder 8. Flank 4. Fore shank 9. Leg 5. Breast 10. Hind shank 8 65 3 2 1
This is a fragment of a calf's- or sheep's-head recipe, broken off mid-sentence and run together with the printer's meat-cutting diagram. The parts that survive describe boiling a whole head with the brains tied separately in cheesecloth, and that is the part that cannot be carried into a modern kitchen.
- Why this one is off the tableBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. Cattle central nervous tissue from animals over the regulatory age threshold (30 months in the US, 12 months in the EU for skull, brain and eyes) is classed as specified risk material and excluded from the human food supply; the prion is not destroyed by two hours of boiling, or by any domestic cooking. There is no handling method that makes this safe.
- The whole head is implicated, not just the brainsRemoving the brains does not resolve the problem. The skull, the trigeminal ganglia and the eyes of older cattle are all controlled tissues, which is why bone-in beef head is regulated rather than simply sold. Opening the skull to get the brains out can also spread nervous tissue onto the meat.
- Sheep and calves are not a loopholeScrapie in sheep and the age rules for calves are handled differently by different regulators, and the rules change. A cook today should not be sorting this out at the counter; a current recipe from a current source is the right starting point.
- What the fragment is missingThe text opens mid-instruction and stops mid-sentence at "The brains will be", so no yield, seasoning, sauce or finishing step survives. Even setting safety aside, there is not enough here to work from.
- The numbered listThe string of digits is a wholesale meat chart that the scanner has flattened into the text: neck, chuck, shoulder, fore shank, breast, ribs, loin, flank, leg, hind shank. It belongs to the diagram on the page, not to the method.
- "Until the jaw bone can be twisted out"This kind of bone-release test turns up in period instructions for long-boiled heads, and it is a reasonable indicator for collagen-rich cuts: the connective tissue has broken down when the bone releases clean. The test itself outlives the dish.
Head cookery was ordinary economy in the American kitchen through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth: calf's head soup, mock turtle, brains scrambled with egg or fried in crumbs, and headcheese all came out of the same butchery. The brains — quick-cooking, delicate, spoiling fast — were poached separately in cloth while the heavy head boiled. The meat charts printed alongside the methods suggest a readership buying larger cuts rather than pre-trimmed trays. Brain dishes had largely disappeared from general American cooking before BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986; regulation subsequently moved these tissues out of the food supply.