Calf's brains, or cervelle de veau, is a traditional delicacy in Europe and Morocco. It is the brain of a calf consumed as meat. It is often served with tongue, sauteed with beurre noir and capers, or mixed with scrambled eggs (a traditional breakfast dish in the United States).
In Italy cervella fritte is a popular dish made of bite-sized batter-fried morsels of beef brain.
Beef brains have a mushy texture and very little inherent flavor and are typically flavored with sauces such as chile sauce and Sauce ravigote. The consumption of beef brains and spines is restricted in many locales because humans may contract Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (commonly known as mad-cow disease), by eating the nervous tissue of diseased animals. Still, there have been few such cases in areas where bovine spine and brains are eaten.
Famous quotes containing the words calf and/or brains:
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and a little child shall lead them.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Isaiah 11:6.
“However low and poor the taking Snuff argues a Man to be in his own Stock of Thought, or Means to employ his Brains and his Fingers, yet there is a poorer Creature in the World than He, and this is a Borrower of Snuff; a Fellow that keeps no Box of his own, but is always asking others for a Pinch.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)