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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Ravioli with Brains
Take one lamb's brains and parboil in slightly salted water for five minutes. Put into a bowl with a small quantity of curds, one egg, salt and pepper, dash of nutmeg, and a little grated Parmesan cheese, and mix all together. Then put by teaspoonfuls on the paste as in preceding receipt. Cook for ten minutes in boiling salted water, and serve with tomato sauce.
The filling is the problem, and it is not a problem that can be cooked away. What follows explains why this particular ravioli belongs to the reading shelf rather than the kitchen.
- Brain is a specified risk materialBrain and spinal cord from cattle, and from sheep and goats over twelve months old, are classed as specified risk materials in the UK, the EU and many other jurisdictions, and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food.
- Prions are not destroyed by cookingThe infectious agent in transmissible spongiform encephalopathies is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. Five minutes in salted water, or ten minutes of boiling in the ravioli, has no bearing on it; prions survive temperatures far above anything a domestic kitchen reaches.
- Sheep carry their own TSEScrapie is the ovine form of the disease family, although it has not been shown to transmit to humans; central nervous tissue is nonetheless precisely the material the controls are designed to keep out of the food chain.
- No safe handling instruction existsThere is no soaking, membrane-stripping or temperature step that makes nervous-system tissue safe, which is why this page carries no adjusted method. Cooks who want a rich, soft ravioli filling of this kind should work from a current recipe using a permitted meat.
- On "curds", for the recordThe curds called for here are most likely fresh drained cheese curd of the ricotta type, used as a binder to lighten the filling. It is the one element of the recipe that translates without difficulty.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was written by Antonia Isola for American readers who had encountered Italian food mainly through immigrant restaurants. Brain-filled ravioli and tortelli were made in parts of northern Italy, where cervella was a cheap, tender offal sold alongside sweetbreads and prized for the smooth, almost custardy texture it gave a filling when bound with egg and fresh curd. The BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s led to bans on brain and spinal tissue, from cattle and from older sheep and goats, as food across Europe, and dishes like this one largely passed out of the butcher's window. The recipe survives as a record of a category of frugal cooking, one that treated the whole animal as edible, that modern rules have largely closed off.