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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Fried Calves Brains with Brown Butter
Soak three calves' brains in cold water one hour. Take up, remove sinews, then place in a saucepan with three tablespoons vinegar, one sliced onion, two branches parsley, one sprig thyme, one bay leaf and enough cold water to cover. Season with teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, then let slowly come to a boil and boil two minutes. Remove and let stand aside ten minutes. Lift with a skimmer, then separate each brain in two. Arrange on a hot dish, strew over a tablespoon capers and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Place an ounce butter in a black frying pan, shuffle the pan on fire until butter obtains a nice light brown, then pour in one tablespoon good vinegar, toss a little, pour butter over the brains and serve.
The book's own editors have already flagged this one, and they were right to. What follows explains why this particular dish is off the table rather than how to attempt it.
- The hazard is the tissue itselfBrain and spinal cord are what regulators call specified risk material: the tissues in which BSE prions concentrate. The risk is not contamination from handling or spoilage, it is inherent to the organ.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not bacteria. They survive boiling, browning in butter, and in laboratory conditions temperatures far beyond anything a kitchen produces. The two-minute simmer and the hot brown butter here have no bearing on the risk at all.
- Three brains is a large doseThree brains is a large quantity -- the recipe halves each of three whole calves' brains, so a single sitting delivers a substantial amount of high-risk tissue whatever the per-animal probability.
- Supply is restricted anywaySupply is restricted -- Since the BSE controls of the 1990s, bovine brain and spinal cord from cattle above a specified age have been banned from the human food chain in the UK, the EU and elsewhere, with age-based restrictions in the United States as well. Material from young calves is not always caught by those limits, but availability is far narrower than it was.
- Reading the old measuresFor historical interest only: a saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper. A "black frying pan" is plain seasoned cast iron or heavy steel.
- If you want the sauceThe browned-butter finish here -- butter browned, sharpened with vinegar, capers and parsley -- is the dressing associated with cervelles au beurre noir, though this version stops at light brown. It belongs to a whole family of dishes. Use a current recipe and put it over skate, poached eggs or cauliflower instead.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in the first decade of the twentieth century, and its French backbone shows in entries like this one. Cervelles au beurre noir was standard bourgeois and restaurant cooking in France: the brains blanched in an acidulated court-bouillon with onion, thyme and bay to firm them and keep them white, then dressed with browned butter cut with vinegar. Offal of this kind was ordinary eating in 1900, cheap and prized for its delicacy of texture, and a cookbook aimed at an ambitious American household would have carried several brain preparations without comment. The dish's disappearance from Anglophone menus owes something to changing taste and a great deal more to the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in the mid-1980s, after which brain and spinal tissue were removed from the food supply in one country after another. Recipes like this survive now as a record of what a well-run kitchen once considered unremarkable.