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
1 Calf's Brain 1 Egg (beaten) Cornmeal, Butter, Parsley Soak brain in cold water, then scald for just a second. Dip in the egg and brown, in butter substitute; garnish with corn meal and fry on both sides, a light parsley and serve hot.
This is a short, plainly written pan-fry, and the reason it cannot be made has nothing to do with technique. The material itself is the problem.
- The tissue itselfCalf brain is central nervous system tissue, the category that carries the highest infectivity for the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Prions are not destroyed by scalding, frying, or any ordinary cooking temperature, so no adjustment to the method makes this dish safe.
- Why it is no longer soldWhy it is hard to buy -- Since the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, cattle brain and spinal cord have been designated specified risk material and largely removed from the human food supply in the United States, the United Kingdom and the EU. The controls are tied to the animal's age -- broadly, cattle over twelve months in the EU and UK, over thirty months in the US -- so brain from a very young calf is not banned outright in every jurisdiction, but the retail trade has effectively vanished.
- The disease it can causeVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human illness linked to eating BSE-infected tissue, has an incubation period that can run for decades and is invariably fatal. There is no treatment and no test that would clear a given brain as safe.
- Other brains are not a workaroundSheep and goats carry scrapie, a related prion disease, and deer and elk carry chronic wasting disease. Pork brain is still eaten in some places but has been associated with occupational immune disorders among slaughterhouse workers who aerosolised it. Nothing in this family is a straightforward substitution.
- If you want the textureThe appeal here is the soft, custardy interior against a fried crust. A current recipe for a delicate offal or for fried soft cheese will get you closer than adapting this page.
- On the garbled instructionsAs printed, the steps are out of order: the brain is dipped in egg and browned before the cornmeal is applied. The intended sequence is presumably egg, then cornmeal coating, then frying, with the parsley added as a garnish at the end. 'Butter substitute' sits oddly against the ingredient list, which simply says butter; it most likely points to margarine, though the recipe does not say so. Noted for the record only.
Brains were standard butcher's fare in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, sold cheaply alongside liver, heart and tripe because nothing from a slaughtered animal was expected to go to waste. Household cookbooks of the period leaned hard on the cheap cuts: brains scrambled with eggs, brains fried in cornmeal, brains in cream sauce on toast. The technique here — soak in cold water to draw out blood, scald briefly to firm the tissue enough to handle, then crumb and fry — was the near-universal treatment in period cookery. What ended the practice was not taste but epidemiology: the recognition in the late twentieth century that prion disease concentrates in nervous tissue closed off a whole category of food that had been on American tables for generations.