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 Croquettes, Bologna Style
(Fritto composto alla Bolognese) Take a piece of stewed lean veal, a little brain boiled or stewed, and a slice of ham. Chop and grind everything fine. Add a yolk of egg or a whole egg, according to the quantity, and a little Balsamella (see No. 54). Put the hash on the fire and stir until the egg is cooked. Add finally grated cheese, a taste of nutmeg, and, if you have them, some truffles chopped very fine and put in a plate. When quite cold make some little balls as large as a walnut and roll them in flour. Then dip in beaten egg and bread crumb ground very fine, repeating the operation twice, and fry. 68
This is a veal-and-brain croquette from Artusi's Bolognese repertoire, and the brain is not an optional garnish — it is the ingredient that gives the filling its texture. That is also why the recipe cannot be followed today.
- The brain is the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material precisely because they are the tissues that carry the BSE agent. Cooking, stewing, grinding and deep-frying do not destroy prions; they are not inactivated at any temperature a kitchen can reach.
- The disease has no treatmentVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human illness linked to eating BSE-contaminated nervous tissue, is invariably fatal and has no cure. There is no dose considered safe, which is why regulators removed these cuts from the food chain rather than setting a limit.
- It is not simply a sourcing questionIn the EU, UK and US, bovine brain from cattle above a specified age is banned from human food outright and cannot legally be sold. A butcher offering "calf brain" is a different animal and a different regulatory category, but the risk assessment is not one an amateur should be making.
- Substitution changes the dishThe brain here is doing structural work — it is what makes the interior soft and unctuous rather than dry minced veal. Leaving it out does not give you a lighter version of this croquette; it gives you a different one. Use a current recipe for polpettine or fritto misto if that is what you want.
- BalsamellaNo. 54 in this book is béchamel. Here it functions as a binder, holding the ground meat together before the mixture is chilled and shaped.
- Double breadingThe instruction to flour, egg and crumb "twice" is the one technique here worth carrying away. A doubled coating on a soft, wet filling is what keeps it from bursting in the fat, and it applies equally to any croquette made with a béchamel base.
This fritto composto alla bolognese belongs to a family of Emilian fried dishes in which cooked leftovers — a scrap of stewed veal, a slice of ham, a spoonful of béchamel — were bound, chilled, shaped and fried into something that read as a new course; the dish and its wording are close to Pellegrino Artusi's treatment of the same preparation. Brain, sweetbreads and other offal were unremarkable in nineteenth-century Italian cooking rather than daring, valued for a smooth richness that muscle meat cannot supply; the fritto misto of Bologna and Milan combined such items with vegetables and croquettes on one platter. The truffles Artusi mentions "if you have them" suggest a bourgeois rather than a peasant table. The Italian Cook Book, published in English in the early twentieth century, drew on this Italian repertoire for American readers, at a time when the BSE risk that now bars the central ingredient was some seventy years from being described.