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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Breaded Calves' Brains
Soak the brains of two calves in cold water one-half hour, and then remove the thin membrane covering them and see that they are perfectly white and bloodless. Divide each brain into six portions-twelve in all-and tie each up in a small piece of muslin. Put them into enough boiling water to cover them and boil gently one-half hour; then take them up, change the hot water for cold and put them back. When they are cool take off the muslin and season them generously with salt and pepper. Dip them in beaten egg also seasoned with salt and pepper then into fine bread crumbs; put them into a frying basket and cook in boiling fat two minutes. Serve with ravigote or cream sauce.
RICE À LA CRÉOLE-Chop one large onion and a slice of cooked ham very fine. Put this into a saucepan with one tablespoon of butter and one cup of boiled rice. To this add three-fourths of a can of tomatoes which have been thoroughly cooked and seasoned with salt and paprika. Mix all thoroughly, put in a baking-dish, cover with bread crumbs and bake for fifteen minutes.
The page carries two separate items: breaded calves' brains, which should not be made, and a rice à la Créole that is unobjectionable. The notes below deal with both.
- Why the brains are off the tableBovine central nervous tissue is the tissue most likely to carry the BSE prion agent, and in many jurisdictions brain and spinal cord from cattle above a set age are classed as specified risk material and barred from the food supply; very young calves may fall outside those rules, but the risk is not one worth taking. The prion is not destroyed by the half-hour boil or the fat bath described here, and variant CJD has no treatment.
- Not a cooking-time problemNo adjustment to time or temperature makes this dish safe. Prions survive temperatures far above frying heat, so the usual logic of "cook it longer" does not apply.
- "Boiling fat" for deep fryingThe phrase means fat hot enough to brown crumbs quickly; no temperature is given anywhere in the text, and modern deep-frying practice would put that at around 375F. Fat does not boil; the bubbling is water escaping from the food.
- Ravigote or cream sauceRavigote is a sharp herb-and-vinegar sauce, cream sauce a plain white sauce. Either belongs with any number of modern breaded fritters.
- Rice à la Créole: the tomatoCanned tomatoes of this period came in cans of varying size, commonly somewhere between a pound and a pound and a quarter, so three-fourths of a can is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of tomatoes with their juice. Cook them down first as instructed, or the finished dish will be wet.
- Rice à la Créole: oven heatNo temperature is given. Fifteen minutes is only long enough to heat the dish through and colour the crumbs, so 375F to 400F is the sensible reading; everything in the pan is already cooked.
- Rice à la Créole: yieldOne cup of boiled rice with onion, ham and tomato serves two or three as a side. Double it for a family dish and use a shallow baking dish so more of the crumb surface crisps.
Calves' brains held a settled place in American and European cookery well into the twentieth century, part of a broader habit of using every part of an expensively butchered animal. The technique here, soaking, blanching, chilling, then crumbing and deep-frying, is standard French practice for soft offal, the muslin bundles serving to keep the fragile lobes from breaking up in the water. Their disappearance from home cooking is largely a story of the late 1980s and 1990s, when the BSE epidemic in British cattle and the identification of variant CJD in humans led to bans on bovine brain and spinal tissue in the food chain across much of the world. The rice Créole printed beneath is a different tradition entirely, a Northern magazine's shorthand for the Louisiana kitchen: onion, ham, tomato and paprika standing in for a fuller Creole seasoning.