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.
Home › Sandwiches › Fried Calf's Brains (Calf's brains should be soaked)
Fried Calf's Brains (Calf's brains should be soaked)
Calf's brains should be soaked in cold water until blanched, then simmered for ten minutes in water to which several tablespoonfuls of vinegar should be added. When cold cut them into quarters or thick slices, dip each piece into slightly-beaten egg, roll in bread crumbs and fry golden brown in smoking hot fat.
This is a straightforward crumb-and-fry preparation, but the material itself is the problem. Bovine central nervous tissue is classed as specified risk material in most countries and is not something to cook at home.
- Why the tissue is the hazardBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which the BSE prion concentrates. Prions are not destroyed by soaking, by ten minutes of simmering, or by frying in smoking-hot fat; they survive temperatures and treatments that inactivate bacteria and viruses entirely.
- The disease has no cureVariant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human illness linked to eating BSE-infected nervous tissue, is invariably fatal and has no treatment. The incubation period can run to many years, so there is no way to judge safety from the appearance or freshness of the brain.
- It is a regulated productSince the BSE controls of the late 1990s and early 2000s, brain and spinal cord from cattle over a specified age have been classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain in the EU, the UK, the US and elsewhere. Brains from calves below the age threshold remain legal in some places, but supply is far more restricted than it was in 1900.
- Soaking and vinegar are cosmeticThe cold-water soak draws out blood so the brains blanch white, and the vinegar in the simmering water firms the tissue and keeps it pale. Neither step has any bearing on safety; both are about colour and texture.
- If you want the dishThe crisp crumbed-and-fried treatment applies to plenty of other things. Use a current recipe for something else rather than adapting this one.
Brains were standard offal cookery in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and European kitchens, valued for a soft, almost custardy interior that sets off a fried crumb coat, and cheap enough to belong in the same chapter as croquettes and made-over meats. The preliminary soak until "blanched" and the vinegar in the poaching water are often said to follow French practice, where cervelle de veau was poached in an acidulated court-bouillon before being finished in butter or crumbs, though the line of descent is inference rather than record. The dish had been in decline in English-language home cooking for some time, a retreat generally thought to have been hastened by the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s and the reshaping of what butchers were permitted to sell, and it now survives in most places only as a historical entry of exactly this kind.