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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Scrambled Eggs with Calf's Brains
Follow recipe for Scrambled Eggs with Sweetbreads, using calf's brains in place of sweetbreads.
To Prepare Calf's Brains. Soak one hour in cold water to cover. Remove membrane, and parboil twenty minutes in boiling, salted, acidulated water. Drain, put in cold water; as soon as cold, drain again, and separate in small pieces. 2 eggs
This is a chafing-dish supper dish from an era when calf's brains were an everyday butcher's item. It cannot be prepared safely today, and the reasons are specific to the tissue involved rather than to the technique.
- Why brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they can carry the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy, linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prions are not proteins in the ordinary sense of being destroyed by cooking; parboiling twenty minutes, or any domestic cooking, does nothing to them.
- Not a matter of sourcingCattle brain and spinal tissue are controlled as specified risk material in the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU, with the controls keyed to the age of the animal (over 12 months in the UK and EU, 30 months and older in the US). Even where brains from young stock remain legally saleable, they are hard to obtain and the precaution behind the rules applies.
- The chafing dish makes it worse, not betterIf the dish is finished over a chafing dish -- the instructions as printed here do not say, referring only to the parent recipe -- that is no help: a spirit lamp holds eggs at a low temperature by design, and brains are a highly perishable soft offal. Setting the prion issue aside, a chafing dish is not an appliance capable of bringing anything to a reliable temperature.
- Acidulated waterWater sharpened with vinegar or lemon juice, used to firm and whiten the tissue during parboiling. The proportion is not stated here. It affects colour and texture only, and confers no safety benefit whatever.
- If you want the dishThe parent recipe, Scrambled Eggs with Sweetbreads, is a different organ entirely and remains a normal item of commerce. Use a current recipe for it rather than adapting the instructions above.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American middle-class homes around 1900, and Fannie Farmer devoted a whole volume to it, Chafing Dish Possibilities (1898): a spirit lamp on the sideboard let a hostess cook eggs, oysters, lobster or creamed offal at the table without the kitchen staff. Calf's brains belonged to the large family of what butchers called variety meats, cheap, delicate and quickly cooked, and they turn up in period cookbooks fried in crumbs, in black butter, or folded into eggs like this. The preliminary soaking, membrane-stripping and parboiling in acidulated water is the standard nineteenth-century handling for any soft offal, meant to draw out blood and set the texture enough that it can be broken into pieces. The dish is often said to have fallen out of mainstream Anglo-American cooking for reasons of taste well before the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s closed the question for good, though brains persisted in regional and immigrant cooking into the later twentieth century.