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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Scrambled Eggs with Calf's Brains
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Beat up with a fork one minute. Plunge one fresh calf's brain in cold water fifteen minutes. Remove the blood sinews, then place it in a saucepan with pint of boiling water, two tablespoons vinegar and half teaspoon salt, and let slowly boil five minutes. Drain, then cut each half in two lengthwise and lightly roll in flour. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add brains and briskly cook them two minutes on each side. Lift them up with a skimmer, then cut them in half-inch pieces. Heat a tablespoon of melted butter in a sauteuse, drop in the eggs and cook for six minutes, briskly and frequently stirring meanwhile; then add the brains, gently mix, dress on a hot deep dish and serve.
The eggs are unremarkable; the problem is the brain, and it is not a problem that better technique can solve.
- Why this dish failsBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they can carry the prions responsible for BSE, which causes variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. The disease is invariably fatal and there is no treatment.
- Cooking does not helpPrions are not conventional pathogens. They are misfolded proteins that survive boiling, frying and ordinary sterilisation, so the five-minute blanch and the two minutes a side in butter have no bearing on the risk.
- The vinegar bath is not a safeguardThe acidulated water in the original is there to firm the tissue and keep it white, as with any offal. It is a texture and colour step, not a decontamination step.
- LegalitySince the BSE controls of the 1990s and 2000s, brain and spinal tissue from cattle over a specified age (12 months in the UK and EU, 30 months in the United States) has been barred from the human food chain. Whether a butcher can legally supply brain at all now depends on the age of the animal and the jurisdiction.
- Age of the animal is not a licenceVeal calves fall below the age thresholds used in these regulatory schemes, so calf's brain is not classed as specified risk material in some jurisdictions. That is not a guarantee about an individual carcass, and it is not a reason to seek this out.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for soft-scrambled eggs and leave the brains out. Nothing in the egg method here is worth reconstructing around a banned ingredient.
- For readers of the text onlyA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is four tablespoons of milk; a saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. A sauteuse is a shallow, sloping-sided saute pan.
Filippini's International Cook Book collects the repertoire of a chef who spent his career at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects a period when the whole animal reached the table as a matter of course. Calf's brains were standard restaurant fare across France, Italy, Spain and the German-speaking countries -- cervelle au beurre noir, Hirn mit Ei, scrambled with eggs as here -- prized for a soft, faintly sweet texture that reads as a luxury rather than a thrift ingredient. The soaking in cold water, the stripping of membrane and blood vessels, and the short poach in acidulated water are the classical preparation, unchanged in the cookbooks of the nineteenth century and repeated in Escoffier. The trade in brains persisted throughout the twentieth century; what ended it in the English-speaking world was not taste but the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in the mid-1980s and the human cases that followed, after which nervous-system tissue was removed from the food supply. Recipes like this one now survive mainly as evidence of how thoroughly a single disease can delete a whole category of food from the table.}