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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How to Cook Sweetbreads and Brains
Remove the thin outer skin or membrane and soak in cold water, changing the water often, an hour or more. Cover with salted boiling water, acidulated with lemon juice and flavored with vegetables, and cook, just below the boiling-point, twenty minutes. They are then ready for preparation in any of the ways mentioned. Tie the brains in a cloth before cooking.
This is the base preparation the book refers back to in its sweetbread and brain salads: skin, soak, then poach in acidulated court bouillon. The brain half of it cannot be recommended today, and that is the point to start from.
- Why the brains failBovine brain and spinal cord are classified as specified risk material because they can carry the prion that causes BSE, which in humans presents as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prions are not destroyed by soaking, acidulation, or twenty minutes below the boil; no domestic cooking step inactivates them. In many jurisdictions cattle brain is barred from the food supply outright.
- The soaking is cosmetic, not protectiveChanging the cold water for an hour draws out blood. Note that the book strips the membrane first and soaks afterwards. The soaking has no bearing on pathogen risk, and the book's own gentle poach, deliberately held under boiling point to keep the texture soft, is a culinary instruction, not a safety one.
- Sweetbreads are a separate caseSweetbreads are thymus and pancreas, not nervous tissue, and are still sold and eaten. If you want to use this method, use a current recipe from a reliable modern source and buy from a butcher who can tell you the source; do not treat the brain and sweetbread instructions here as interchangeable.
- Acidulated waterLemon juice in the poaching liquid keeps the tissue pale rather than grey, the same reason it is used for celeriac and artichokes. "Flavored with vegetables" is not specified further here; a court bouillon of this period would typically have used onion, carrot and celery, often with a bay leaf and peppercorns.
- Tying in a clothA period technique for anything that would otherwise break apart or fray in the pot. The cloth also let the cook lift the whole lot out in one motion; some period recipes then press the brains flat under a weight before slicing.
- Where this sits in the bookThe instruction ends "ready for preparation in any of the ways mentioned" because it is a cross-reference, not a finished dish. The ways in question are not given on this page.
Brains and sweetbreads were standard genteel food in American and English cookery from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, prized for a delicacy of texture that suited invalid cookery and ladies' luncheons alike — soft, mild, and easy to eat. Chafing-dish and salad books of the 1900s leaned on them heavily because they cook fast and take a sauce well, exactly what a table-side burner demands. Their disappearance from ordinary Anglo-American cooking is only partly a matter of taste: the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in the 1980s, and the human cases that followed in the 1990s, led to regulation of specified risk materials that removed bovine brain and spinal cord from the food chain in Britain and the European Union, while in the United States and Canada the rules target cattle over thirty months, leaving brains from younger animals legally sold. Sweetbreads survived that cull and have had a restaurant revival; brains, in beef at least, did not.