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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Calves' Brains, Horly
Place three pairs calves' brains into cold water for five minutes; take them up, skin well, wash again in cold water, drain, place in a small saucepan and cover with fresh water, adding a teaspoon salt, a saltspoon pepper, two tablespoons good vinegar and one bay leaf. Slowly boil for five minutes. Drain well, then roll them in flour, then in beaten eggs and lastly in bread crumbs. Place them in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for five minutes, or till of a golden colour. Drain them thoroughly, dress on a hot dish and serve with two gills hot tomato sauce separately.
This is a fried brain dish of a kind once standard on hotel menus, and it cannot be reproduced today. The notes below explain the specific hazard and decode the period language for readers working through the text.
- Why this one is off the tableBovine brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials because they can carry the prion agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Prions are not destroyed by the five-minute boil, the deep fry, or any domestic cooking; there is no treatment and the disease is fatal. Bovine brain and spinal tissue is restricted or excluded from the food supply in a number of jurisdictions on these grounds, with the rules generally keyed to the age of the animal.
- Cooking does not helpUnlike bacterial risks, prion infectivity survives temperatures far above frying heat and resists ordinary disinfectants. There is no time-and-temperature adjustment that makes this dish safe, which is why no revised method is offered here.
- If you want the techniqueThe flour-egg-crumb coating and basket fry are the classic a la Villeroy-adjacent treatment applied to any pre-poached delicate item. Use a current recipe for a permitted ingredient rather than adapting this one.
- "Horly"A period spelling of Orly — in French cookery, an item marinated or blanched, coated (commonly in batter, here in crumbs), deep-fried, and sent to table with tomato sauce served apart. The tomato sauce is the conventional accompaniment to the treatment rather than an incidental garnish.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so the two gills of tomato sauce called for is one cup, served in a sauceboat alongside.
- SaltspoonAn actual small spoon from a Victorian salt cellar, taken as roughly a quarter teaspoon.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a large American or English kitchen worked from the French repertoire, and offal held a respectable place in it: brains, sweetbreads, kidneys and tripe were cheap, quick to cook, and prized for their softness against a crisp coating. The Orly treatment — blanch in an acidulated court-bouillon, flour, egg, crumb, deep-fry, tomato sauce apart — and the vinegar and bay in the poaching water here do double duty, firming the tissue and cutting its blandness. Brains stayed on restaurant menus in Europe and the United States well into the twentieth century; the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in the mid-1980s, and the human cases linked to it in the following decade, made them far less common, though they are still served in France, Italy, Spain and parts of the United States. Reading the recipe now is a reminder that food safety knowledge is cumulative, and that a dish can be entirely ordinary in one generation and regarded warily in the next.