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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Paste for Frying
(Pastella per fritto) Dilute three teaspoonfuls of flour with two teaspoonfuls of oil. Add two eggs, a pinch of salt, and mix well. This mixture will take on the aspect of a smooth cream and is used to glaze fried brains, sweetbreads and the like. All these things are first to be scalded in boiling salt water. Add a pinch of salt and one of pepper when taking from the water. The brains, sweetbreads etc. are then to be cut in irregular pieces, thrown into the paste, or cream, described above and fried in oil or good lard.
In frying these are often united to liver or veal cutlets. The liver must be cut in very thin slices and the cutlets beaten with the side of a big knife and given a good shape. Season with salt and pepper, dip in beaten egg and after a few hours sprinkle with bread crumbs and fry. Serve with lemon. 64
The batter itself is unremarkable, but the recipe exists to coat brains and sweetbreads, and that is where it fails today. The notes below explain why rather than how.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenCattle brain and spinal cord are specified risk materials for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the agent behind variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and no ordinary cooking temperature inactivates the prion. The restrictions are age-dependent: in the EU and UK the skull including brain, and the spinal cord, of cattle over twelve months are excluded from the food supply, and in the United States the same applies to cattle of thirty months and over. The recipe does not say which animal's brains are intended.
- Batter proportions look wrongThree teaspoonfuls of flour and two of oil will not bind two eggs into anything resembling a cream. A larger spoon size in the underlying Italian may lie behind this, but as printed the quantity is simply ambiguous.
- The two-stage breadingThe second half of the entry describes a different method for liver and cutlets: egg first, then a rest of several hours, then crumbs. The purpose of the pause is not stated in the text; a rest before or after crumbing to help the coating hold is a familiar idea, though modern practice normally crumbs at once and rests the finished pieces.
- Oil or good lard'Good lard' is most likely fresh rendered fat with a clean smell rather than the hydrogenated block lard of the mid twentieth century. Modern rendered lard behaves as intended.
- If you want the dishA fritto misto can be built from vegetables, artichoke, zucchini flowers, small fish or veal cutlets without any nervous tissue. Use a current recipe with measured quantities rather than adapting this one.
The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, sits comfortably alongside the household tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi in La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), though no direct derivation is documented: a single all-purpose pastella given once, then referred to across a family of fried dishes. The fritto misto it serves was frugal cooking dressed up as a course, a way of turning the cheap and quickly perishable parts of a slaughtered animal, brains, sweetbreads, liver, into something crisp and lemon-sharpened. Offal of this kind was ordinary eating throughout Italy well into the twentieth century and appears to have been unremarkable on the table; the restrictions that now put brain and spinal cord out of reach date only to the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, some seventy years after this book was printed.