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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June 15
Menu: Cream of Pea Soup; Baked Brains; Mashed Potatoes; Escalloped Asparagus Romaine Salad; Greengage Ice Cream; Coffee Baked Brains-Prepare brain of an ox by washing and skimming it, and then steep it on back of range for 1 hour. Rub it with flour and salt, lay on it bits of Crisco, and set in oven, having added water to dish in which it is to bake. Bake it 1 hour, basting it often, and serve with mush. room sauce. Onion sauce may be substituted for the mushroom sauce.
This is a page to read rather than cook. The central ingredient is the one tissue that food-safety authorities single out as unfit for the table, and nothing in the method addresses it.
- The hazard is the ingredient itselfBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the prion that causes bovine spongiform encephalopathy concentrates. Prions are not destroyed by an hour in the oven, by soaking, or by any domestic cooking temperature, so no adjustment to the timing makes this dish safe.
- Not simply a matter of sourcingCattle brain from older animals is classified as specified risk material in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Canada, and is removed from the food supply at slaughter. Age thresholds vary by jurisdiction, but an ox brain of the kind this recipe assumes would fall inside them.
- Skimming and steeping did nothing protectiveThe washing, skimming and hour of gentle soaking on the cool end of the range were about texture and blood removal. Cooks of the period had no concept of a transmissible protein, and the method reflects that.
- "Back of range" and "steep"A coal or wood range had a hot firebox end and a cooler far end; food was moved back to hold below a simmer. Steeping here means holding in barely warm water, not boiling.
- If you want the sauceThe mushroom and onion sauces the recipe leans on are period staples in their own right and appear elsewhere in books of this era, generally built on a butter-and-flour roux with stock or milk. Take a current recipe for either and serve it over something else.
- What Crisco is doing hereThe bits of shortening dotted over the top and the water in the pan are a basting arrangement: fat melts down, water keeps the dish from scorching. The technique is sound; the subject of it is not.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for lard and butter anywhere they had previously been used, and its "Calendar of Dinners" section exists to prove the point across a full year of ordinary menus. Baked brains belonged squarely to that ordinariness. Brains, sweetbreads, tripe and kidneys were cheap, widely sold, and treated as delicate rather than daring; brains were commonly recommended for invalids and children on the grounds that they were soft and easily digested. The dish here follows the standard pattern of the period, a parboil or steep to firm the tissue followed by a dredge and a slow bake with frequent basting, finished with a brown sauce. Its disappearance from American home cooking was already well advanced by the late twentieth century for reasons of taste; the BSE epidemic identified in British cattle in 1986, and the human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease linked to it in the mid-1990s, closed the question permanently.