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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Calf's Brain Croquettes
One good-sized calf's brain will make from six to eight croquettes. After soaking and washing cover with cold water, add one teaspoonful of salt, a small slice of onion, a small blade of mace (if liked), and simmer gently for twentyone minutes. When cold cut fine with a silver knife and add to it one cupful of white sauce made with two tablespoonfuls of flour and one tablespoonful of butter, a high seasoning of onion juice and chopped parsley, or season to taste. When cold mould into small croquettes, egg and crumb them and fry in smoking hot fat.
This is a recipe, and a competently written one for its day, but it is not one to cook. The problem is the main ingredient rather than the method.
- Why the brain itself is the hazardBovine central nervous system tissue — brain, spinal cord, dorsal root ganglia — is the tissue in which the BSE prion accumulates. Prions are misfolded proteins, not bacteria, and simmering for twenty-one minutes or frying in smoking fat destroys none of their infectivity; they survive temperatures and treatments that sterilise anything living.
- The disease has no treatmentVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human illness linked to eating BSE-contaminated tissue, is invariably fatal and there is no cure and no post-exposure remedy. The risk is small in absolute terms but the consequence is absolute, which is why regulators removed the tissue from the food supply rather than setting a tolerance.
- It is not simply a matter of sourcingBrain and spinal cord from cattle over a certain age are designated specified risk material and are banned from the human food chain in the UK, the EU, Canada and the United States. A butcher offering calf brain is working within a narrow age exemption in some jurisdictions and outside the law in others; this is not an ingredient to hunt down.
- Nothing in the technique can be salvaged as a fixThe soaking and washing, the silver knife (used because ordinary steel discoloured delicate pale flesh), the twice-cooling before moulding — all of it is sound croquette practice. None of it addresses the actual risk, and applying it to brain does not make brain safe.
- If you want the dishThe same white-sauce-and-crumb croquette method is the backbone of dozens of period recipes built on chicken, sweetbread substitutes, salmon, mushroom or rice. Use a current recipe for one of those rather than adapting this page.
Calf's brain was a routine, cheap and rather genteel ingredient in Anglo-American cookery well into the twentieth century, valued for its soft texture and mild flavour and treated much as one treated sweetbreads: soaked, blanched, skinned, and then dressed up in sauce, breaded, or served with black butter. The recipe's small period details are worth noticing: the blade of mace, a common flavouring for pale meats; and the silver knife, often recommended in nineteenth-century cookery writing on the grounds that steel blades discoloured delicate pale foods. Brain dishes disappeared from mainstream English-language cooking gradually across the later twentieth century, and then abruptly: BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986, and variant CJD in humans was described a decade later, leading to bans on nervous-system tissue in the food supply that ended a very long culinary tradition.