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.
Fried Brains
Take one lamb's brain, or one-half of a calf's brain, put it in a saucepan with cold water, change the water from time to time for a couple of hours, until the brains are thoroughly cleansed. Then put them in another saucepan with fresh water, and with several pieces of onion, a little salt, a little vinegar (one tablespoon to each brain), and some parsley stems. As soon as the water boils, take the saucepan off, remove the brains, and put them onto a napkin. Cut them into four pieces, put these pieces onto a plate, and season with a little olive-oil, some lemon juice, and chopped parsley. When you are ready to fry, roll in flour, dip in egg, and fry the brain over a moderate fire for seven or eight minutes in olive-oil, lard, or butter.
This is a standard Italian preparation of cervella fritte, but the central ingredient places it outside what can responsibly be cooked today. The notes below explain the specific hazards rather than how to proceed.
- The BSE risk is specific to this tissueBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the prion agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy concentrates. Cooking does not destroy prions; they survive boiling, frying and ordinary autoclaving. This is why nervous-system tissue is treated differently from other offal.
- Calf brain is a regulated materialIn the EU, UK and many other jurisdictions, bovine brain and spinal cord from animals over a specified age are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed at slaughter. Brain from very young calves falls outside those age thresholds in some jurisdictions, but in practice the recipe's "one-half of a calf's brain" is not something an ordinary butcher's counter will supply.
- Lamb brain is not a straightforward substituteSheep carry scrapie, a related transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and ovine brain and spinal cord over a certain age are also restricted in several countries. The recipe's casual offer of either animal reflects a period before the transmissibility of these diseases, or any human risk from them, was understood.
- The blanch is a cleansing step, not a kill stepThe soaking in changed water and the brief bring-to-a-boil are there to purge blood and firm the tissue for handling. No stage of this recipe reaches any temperature or duration that would reduce prion infectivity, because no achievable kitchen temperature does.
- If you want the dishFried, crumbed offal in the same style is a live tradition, and a current recipe using a permitted ingredient should be used instead. Do not adapt this one.
- Reading the method"A moderate fire" for shallow frying means a heat that will set the egg coating without scorching the butter; the book gives no temperature. "Parsley stems" rather than leaves is a common choice for a court-bouillon, where the stalks are discarded with the cooking liquid and the chopped leaves are kept for the seasoning at the end.
Cervella fritte — brains soaked, blanched in an acidulated court-bouillon, then floured, egged and fried — is a familiar item in the Italian offal repertoire, turning up in the fritto misto of Piedmont and Lombardy alongside sweetbreads, artichokes and semolina squares. Its presence in an English-language book of Simple Italian Cookery from the early twentieth century is a reminder that brains were then unremarkable butcher's goods across Europe and America, cheap, quick to cook, and sold from the same counter as liver and kidney. The vinegar and onion in the blanching water are the classic treatment for any pale offal, firming the tissue so it can be sliced and keeping it white. The whole category collapsed in Western home cooking after the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, when bovine nervous tissue was banned from the food chain in Britain and then far more widely; a dish that needed no explanation in the early twentieth century now requires a warning.