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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Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Brains
No. 117. Cervello in Filiserbe (Calf's Brains) Ingredients: Calf's brains, stock, butter, parsley, lemon.
Boil half a calf's brain in good stock for ten minutes, then drain and pour a little melted butter and the juice of half a lemon over the brain; add some chopped parsley fried for one minute in butter, and serve as hot as possible.
No. 118. Cervello alla Milanese (Calf's Brains) Ingredients: Calf's brains, eggs, bread crumbs, butter.
Scald a calf's brain and let it get cold. Wipe it on a cloth, and get it as dry as possible, then cut it into pieces about the size of a walnut, egg and bread crumb them, fry in butter, and strew a little salt over them..
No. 119. Cervello alla Villeroy (Calf's Brains) Ingredients: Calf's brains, eggs, flour, mushrooms, Veluté sauce.
Scald a calf's brain, and when cold cut it up and mask each piece with a thick sauce made of well-reduced Veluté (No. 2), mixed with chopped cooked mushrooms; flour them over and dip them into the yolk of an egg, and fry as quickly as possible.
No. 120. Frittura of Liver and Brains Ingredients: Calf's liver and brains (or lamb's or pig's fry), butter, ham, flour, puff pastry.
Cut up half a pound of liver in small slices, flour and fry them in butter or dripping, together with a calf's or pig's or sheep's brain, previously scalded and also cut up.
Serve with bits of fried ham and little diamond - shaped pieces of puff pastry.
No. 121. Cervello in Frittata Montano (Calf's Brains) Ingredients: Calf's brains, stock, cream, eggs, spice, Parmesan butter.
Boil a calf's brain in good stock for ten minutes, let it get cold, cut it up into little balls, and mask each piece with a mixture made of half a gill of cream, the yolks of two eggs, a little spice, a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan, and the whites of two eggs well beaten up. Fry the balls in butter, and serve as hot as possible. You may mask and cook the calf's brain without cutting it up, if you prefer it so.
These five preparations all rest on the same ingredient, and that ingredient is the reason the page carries a warning rather than a conversion table.
- Why this cannot be madeCalf's brain is central nervous system tissue, the tissue in which the prion agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy concentrates. Cooking does not destroy prions: they survive boiling, frying and ordinary sterilisation temperatures, so none of the ten-minute simmers or quick butter fries here reduce the risk at all.
- The scald is not a safeguardNos. 118 and 119 begin by scalding the brain and letting it cool, which appears to be a firming and cleaning step rather than a kill step. In any case, no temperature reachable by boiling or frying in a domestic kitchen inactivates prions, so the fully fried versions are no safer than the poached ones.
- Not merely a matter of sourcingBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain, but the rules are keyed to the animal's age: in the EU and UK the brain of cattle over twelve months, in the US of cattle thirty months and older. Brain from young calves falls outside some of those provisions and may still be sold in certain jurisdictions, so what governs availability is local law rather than a universal ban -- and legality is not the same as safety.
- The lamb and pig substitutions in No. 120The recipe offers sheep's or pig's brain as alternatives. Sheep are subject to their own transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, scrapie, which has not been shown to transmit to humans, though sheep brain is nonetheless restricted alongside bovine in a number of jurisdictions. Pig brain is not a prion concern but carries its own hazards and is not a like-for-like fix for the dish as written.
- If you want the dishLook to a current recipe for a different offal fry rather than adapting these. The lemon-butter-parsley treatment of No. 117 and the egg-and-crumb method of No. 118 are standard Italian handling for tender organ meats generally, and modern cookbooks apply them to ingredients that are still sold.
- For reading the pageA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, about 5 fl oz, so half a gill is roughly 2 1/2 fl oz, about four to five tablespoons. Veluté is velouté, the white stock sauce given as No. 2 in the same book, reduced here until thick enough to coat.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was Mrs W. G. Waters's attempt to teach English households Italian cooking through a frame story of ten dinners, and its brain recipes show how unremarkable the ingredient then was. Calf's brain was cheap, delicate and quick, and many European repertoires had a version: the Milanese egg-and-crumb fry, the French method of coating morsels in reduced velouté, the fritto misto of liver and brains with fried ham that appears here as No. 120. Cervello in Filiserbe and Frittata Montano are the kind of loosely transliterated dish names common in Anglo-Italian cookbooks of the period, and their exact origins are hard to pin down. What ended the tradition was not taste but epidemiology: Britain banned specified bovine offal, brain included, in 1989, in the course of the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s, and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease was identified in humans in 1996; a category of dish that filled pages in books like this one vanished from professional and domestic cooking.