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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Omelette with Calves' Brains
Plunge two fresh calves' brains in cold water for thirty minutes. Remove all the sinews, place in a saucepan with two tablespoons vinegar, a teaspoon salt, one bay leaf and enough cold water to cover, then boil five minutes. Drain well and cut each half in two. Lightly roll in flour, heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, arrange in the brains and briskly fry three minutes on each side. Lift up and keep hot. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Briskly beat with fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, stir with fork for two minutes, let rest a half minute, fold up two opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest a minute, turn on a hot dish. Arrange the brains around the omelette; add an ounce butter to the pan of brains, toss on fire until a light brown; pour in a teaspoon vinegar, toss a little, pour over the omelette and serve.
This dish is built on a tissue that is now classed as specified risk material in most beef-producing countries. The notes below explain why the recipe cannot be followed, not how to adapt it.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the highest infectivity in BSE-affected cattle. The agent is a misfolded prion protein, not a bacterium, and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans is untreatable and fatal.
- Cooking does nothingThe five-minute boil and the brisk fry in butter would kill any ordinary pathogen. Prions survive ordinary cooking temperatures, autoclaving at standard settings and most disinfectants, so no time or temperature in a domestic kitchen makes this safer.
- Age of the animal is not a safeguardAge of the animal is not a reliable safeguard -- Filippini specifies calves, and it is sometimes argued that young animals are lower risk. Age is in fact one of the criteria regulators use: EU and UK rules classify bovine skull and brain as specified risk material above a defined age, so calf brain is not excluded on identical terms. Even so, the tissue is seldom offered for sale as food in those markets.
- SourcingWhere cattle brains appear at all they are restricted or region-specific. Lamb, pork and goat brains are handled differently under different national rules; that is a matter for a current, jurisdiction-specific source, not for a 1906 cookbook.
- If you want the dishThe omelette technique here is sound and the brown-butter-and-vinegar finish is a standard French treatment that works over other things entirely. Use a current recipe rather than this one.
- Reading the originalFor historical sense only: a gill is a quarter pint, so a half gill is about two fluid ounces, and a saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, assembled The International Cook Book (1906) as a survey of national dishes for American households, and brains were unremarkable in that world. Cervelle was standard French bourgeois cooking: soaked to draw the blood, peeled of membrane, poached in an acidulated court-bouillon, then either floured and fried or served au beurre noir with a splash of vinegar, which is close to the finish Filippini pours over the finished omelette. Offal of this kind was cheap, delicate and considered restorative, and it appears in English, French and American books through the first half of the twentieth century without comment. Its disappearance from Western tables is recent and specific: the British BSE epidemic identified in the mid-1980s, and the subsequent recognition of variant CJD in humans, led to rules removing brain and spinal cord from the food supply. The recipe survives as a record of a taste that regulation, rather than fashion, ended.