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.
Home › To Make Brain Cakes › To Make Brain Cakes
To Make Brain Cakes
452. Blanch the brains of a calf or sheep, and beat them up with yolk of egg, a spoonful of cream, some pepper, salt, a little butter and some chopped parsley. Lay them in your frying-pan in cakes of a nice size and fry a light brown. Drain, before serving them, on paper or a cloth. They may be used alone or as an accompaniment to calves' head hash, &c.; or for croquettes, the brains may be blanched and beaten up with a little parsley and sage, some bread crumbs, moistened with cream, salt and pepper to taste, and a beaten egg to bind them; form into round or oval balls, and fry a light brown. Serve in a napkin.
This is a nineteenth-century use of calf and sheep brains, and it cannot be reproduced safely today. The notes below explain what stands in the way rather than how to adapt it.
- Why the dish fails nowBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they carry the infectious prion of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal, there is no treatment, and no cooking method destroys the prion.
- Sheep brains are not a substituteSheep brains are not a straightforward substitute -- sheep and goats have their own transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, scrapie, which has not been shown to infect humans, though concern that BSE could pass into small ruminants is why sheep and goat skull and spinal cord above a set age fall under the same specified-risk-material controls.
- You cannot buy the ingredientThe ingredient is hard or impossible to buy -- in the UK, the EU and much of North America, bovine brain from cattle over the specified age limit (about 12 months in the UK and EU, 30 months in the US and Canada) is removed at slaughter and destroyed. Where brain from younger animals is still sold at all, it is a specialist item, and in many places the recipe has no lawful starting point.
- Frying gives no safety marginThe instruction to fry "a light brown" leaves the interior barely set, but even a hard fry would not matter here. Prions survive temperatures and times far beyond anything a domestic kitchen reaches, which is why this is a sourcing problem and not a cooking one.
- If you want the textureThe soft, custardy interior this preparation aims at was part of the appeal of brains. Cooks after something comparable should work from a current recipe for a sweetbread or firm-set egg preparation rather than adjusting this one.
- Reading the method'blanch' in period offal cookery usually covers soaking in cold water, peeling away the outer membrane and a brief poach to firm the tissue, rather than only a quick dip in boiling water. The word is often used in that broader sense in nineteenth-century books.
Brains were ordinary butcher's meat in Victorian Britain, sold cheaply with the head and prized for their soft, mild richness -- exactly the custardy set that egg and cream reinforce here. The pairing with calf's head hash points to head cookery in the old sense, where a single calf's head yielded brains, tongue, cheek and stock for more than one dish. Brain cakes and brain croquettes of this kind appear steadily in English cookery books through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and comparable dishes survive in French cervelle au beurre noir and in fritters across the Mediterranean and South Asia. Their near-disappearance from British kitchens is unusually easy to date: the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s and the specified-risk-material controls that followed effectively ended the domestic trade in cattle brain.