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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Fritto Misto - Italian Mixed Fry
Pancake batter (follow recipe on package).
Mouth-size portions of leftover chicken, veal or game, sprays of cooked broccoli or cauliflower, pats of left over spinach or greens, cooked chicken livers, brains, sweetbreads, mushrooms and cubes of Swiss or good meltable cheese of the Welsh rabbit type.
Dip each piece in batter, fry brown in deep fat, and pass around on a platter for eaters to spear their own selection.
A camp-cook's use-up-the-leftovers fry, written when the whole range of butcher's offal was ordinary household food. One item on the list puts the dish out of reach today, and it is not a matter of technique.
- Brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal-cord tissue is the tissue in which BSE prions concentrate, and consumption is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is untreatable and fatal. Frying does not destroy prions, and no cooking time or temperature makes this component safe. Cattle brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material and kept out of the food supply in the US, UK and EU, with the rules turning on the animal's age.
- Sweetbreads too"Sweetbreads" in older American cookery covers both the thymus (throat sweetbread) and the pancreas.
- Use a current recipeIf you want an Italian mixed fry, work from a modern fritto misto recipe built on vegetables, mushrooms, cheese and seafood. The framework here — batter, deep fat, a platter and toothpicks — is sound; the ingredient list is not.
- "Pancake batter (follow recipe on package)"This dates the piece to the era of boxed pancake mix, and the instruction is a shortcut rather than a considered coating. A pancake batter fries heavy and cakey; the thin flour-and-water or egg-white batters used for a proper fritto misto are a different thing entirely.
- "Cheese of the Welsh rabbit type"Meaning a sharp, easily melted cheese — in period usage an aged Cheddar or a Cheshire, alongside the Swiss also named. Not a processed loaf, which had appeared by this date but behaves quite differently in hot fat.
- "Deep fat"No fat is named, and no quantity or vessel size is given anywhere in the original.
- YieldNone is stated, and none can be inferred — the whole conceit is that the amount depends on what came out of the icebox.
Fritto misto means simply "mixed fry," and in Italy it is a regional idea rather than a fixed dish: fritto misto alla piemontese leans on offal, amaretti and semolina, the Ligurian and Adriatic versions on small fish and vegetables. What appears here is an American adaptation of the name, using it as a licence to batter and fry whatever cooked scraps are on hand \frdeep frying in a single kettle is an old and economical method. That brains, sweetbreads and chicken livers sit in the list without comment shows how normal organ meats were on the mid-century American table; the restrictions on cattle brain and spinal tissue came only after BSE was identified in British herds in the 1980s and linked to human disease in 1996.