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
Have three pairs of calves' brains, wash in running cold water for thirty minutes, discard blood sinews, drain well, then plunge in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt, half gill vinegar and slowly boil for two minutes. Drain, split in two lengthwise, lightly roll in flour, dip in beaten egg, then lightly roll in fresh bread crumbs. Arrange in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for six minutes, or until a nice golden colour. Remove, drain well, dredge a half teaspoon salt over, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon, a little parsley greens, and serve. ]]]]]
This page is a historical document rather than a working recipe. The specific problem is the tissue itself, not the technique, so no adjustment of times or temperatures makes it usable.
- The hazard is the tissue, not the cookingBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the infectious prion protein of bovine spongiform encephalopathy concentrates. Prions are not destroyed by boiling, frying, or ordinary cooking temperatures, so the two-minute blanch and six minutes in hot fat do nothing to reduce risk.
- Why the disease mattersBSE-contaminated tissue is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is progressive, untreatable and fatal. Incubation can run for years, which is part of why the risk was invisible to cooks of this period.
- RegulationFollowing the BSE outbreaks of the 1980s and 1990s, brain, spinal cord and other specified risk materials from cattle above set ages were removed from the human food chain in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States. Rules vary by jurisdiction and by the animal's age, and bovine brain is heavily restricted or unavailable in much of this market.
- Substituting another animal does not solve itReaders sometimes assume lamb or pork brain is a workaround. Sheep and goat skull and spinal cord above a certain age are classed as specified risk material in some jurisdictions because of scrapie, and the cooking limitation on prions would apply equally, so this is not a straightforward substitution.
- If you want the dishThe batter-and-basket method here is simply a standard breaded deep-fry. Use a current recipe for a different ingredient and follow current food-safety guidance for it.
- Reading the originalFor historical interest: a gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill is about two to two and a half fluid ounces of vinegar -- roughly four to five tablespoons -- in the blanching water, used to firm the tissue and keep it pale. "Boiling fat" means deep fat at frying heat, and the "frying basket" is a wire basket lowered into a deep kettle.
Brains were standard offal cookery across Europe and America well into the twentieth century, prized for their soft texture and cheapness, and cervelles au beurre noir or breaded and fried brains appear in general cookbooks of the era alongside sweetbreads, tripe and kidneys. The long soak in cold running water and the acidulated blanch are the classic preparation, meant to draw out blood, firm the lobes so they can be split and handled, and set them pale. Presentation on a folded napkin with lemon quarters is a common nineteenth-century service for deep-fried dishes. The dish largely disappeared from Anglophone menus after the BSE crisis, a rare case of a category of cookery being closed off not by taste but by epidemiology.