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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Calf's Brains Fritters
Clean brains, and cook twenty minutes in boiling water, to which is added one-half teaspoon salt, one tablespoon lemon juice, three cloves, two slices onion, and one-half bay leaf. Remove from range, and let stand in water until cold; drain, dry between towels, and separate into pieces. Make a batter of one-half cup flour, one teaspoon baking powder, one-fourth teaspoon salt, a few grains pepper, one egg well beaten, and one-fourth cup milk. Add brains, and drop mixture by spoonfuls into greased muffin rings, placed in a frying-pan in which there is a generous supply of hot lard. Cook on one side until well browned, turn, and cook other side. Arrange on serving dish and pour around Sauce Finiste (see p. 279). 1 pint clams 2 eggs ⅓ cup milk
This is a specified-risk-material recipe, and no adjustment of technique makes it safe. The notes below explain why, and decode the period vocabulary for readers who want to understand the page rather than cook from it.
- Why it cannot be madeBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the prion agent of BSE. Prions are misfolded proteins, and they are not destroyed by twenty minutes in boiling water, by frying, or by any temperature a kitchen can reach. The resulting illness in humans, variant CJD, is untreatable and fatal.
- It is also a regulatory matterSince the BSE controls of the late 1980s and 1990s, brain and spinal cord from cattle over a specified age (12 months in the UK and EU, 30 months in the US) have been classed as "specified risk material" and excluded from the human food chain. Brains from younger animals fall outside those age limits in some jurisdictions, but supply is tightly restricted and in places prohibited. If you want a battered, fried entrée of this type, use a current recipe built on a different ingredient.
- "Remove from range"The range is the stove, not an oven. The instruction is simply to take the pan off the heat and let the brains cool in their own poaching liquid, which firms the tissue before handling.
- Muffin rings in a frying-panPlain metal rings, about three inches across, set directly in the hot fat so a loose batter holds a round shape while the underside sets. The technique survives in egg rings and in crumpet rings.
- A generous supply of hot lardLard is the frying fat this book reaches for most often. No temperature is given; the rings mean the fat comes only part way up, so each side is browned in turn rather than deep-fried.
- Sauce FinisteA cross-reference to another page of the book, not an ingredient you need to source.
- The stray line at the end"1 pint clams / 2 eggs / 1½ cup milk" belongs to the recipe that followed this one in the original typesetting, almost certainly a clam fritter or clam batter. It has nothing to do with the instructions above.
Brains were standard nineteenth-century entrée material on both sides of the Atlantic: cheap, delicate, quick to poach, and valued precisely for the soft texture that modern shoppers find off-putting. The 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats them as unremarkably as it treats sweetbreads and tripe, giving them the same court-bouillon of lemon, clove, onion and bay used for any pale variety meat, then dressing them up in a fritter batter with a French-named sauce for the dinner-party course between fish and roast. That casual availability ended abruptly. The British BSE epidemic identified in 1986, and the recognition of variant CJD in humans in 1996, led to bans on bovine brain and spinal cord in food across Britain, Europe and North America, so a dish that was once ordinary household economy now reads as a closed chapter rather than a recipe."}