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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Baked Calf's Brains
Drop two calves' brains into a bowl of cold water and change the water frequently until they are quite white. Carefully remove the thin outer skin and drop into a sauce pan of boiling salted water to which is added one-quarter of a teaspoon of onion. Simmer for six minutes, drain and dry on a towel. Brush over thoroughly with melted butter and roll in highly seasoned bread crumbs. Place each on a slice of bacon in a pan and bake in a very hot oven for half an hour.
This page is a record of what a turn-of-the-century American kitchen considered ordinary, not a set of instructions to follow. The reasons are specific to the tissue involved.
- The hazard is the tissue itself, not the handlingBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE agent concentrates. Nothing in the recipe — the long soaking, the change of water, the removal of the membrane — has any bearing on that risk.
- Cooking does not helpThe infectious agent in BSE is a misfolded protein, not a bacterium. Six minutes of simmering and half an hour in a hot oven inactivate pathogens generally; they do not reliably inactivate prions, which survive temperatures far beyond anything a domestic oven reaches.
- It is largely off the market anywaySince the BSE controls of the late 1980s and 1990s, bovine brain and spinal cord have been classed as specified risk material in the UK, the EU and North America and removed from the human food chain. The controls are keyed to the age of the animal (broadly over 12 months in the EU/UK, over 30 months in the US), so brains from very young calves may still be sold in some places; the trade is in any case a small fraction of what it was.
- "A very hot oven"In books of this period that means roughly 450–500F. Recorded here only so the original text reads clearly; half an hour at that heat on a bacon slice tells you the author expected a crisp crumb coating rather than gentle cooking.
- "One-quarter of a teaspoon of onion"Genuinely ambiguous in the original — most likely onion juice, which was a common seasoning in American cookbooks of the era, though grated onion is possible. The book does not say.
- If you want the dishCrumbed and baked sweetbreads occupy much the same place on an old menu and are still sold. Use a current recipe.
Brains were standard cheap offal in nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, sold by the set and treated much like sweetbreads: soaked white, blanched, skinned, then crumbed and fried or baked. General household books of the period commonly carry more than one version, often with a sharp sauce or bacon to cut the richness. The trade in edible bovine brain persisted well into the twentieth century and only collapsed after BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986 and linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans in the mid-1990s, after which brain and spinal cord were largely removed from the food supply across most of the Western world. Recipes like this one survive as a marker of how completely a single food-safety finding can retire an entire class of dish.