has anyone ever eaten brains? - Page 5

In other words, the forerunners of internet porn.

I still can't find that recipe. But, I remember that Grandfather used to braise his brains, then pour a white sauce, over them. The white sauce had garlic, and lemon. He'd throw five or six garlic cloves into the sauce, whole, along with the juice of one lemon. Let the sauce simmer slowly, for about an hour, stirring whenever necessary. Add extra milk (always hot,) if sauce gets too thick. Discard the garlic cloves; spread them over French bread. Garnish with extra brains and parsley.

My dad had a medical school classmate who did. Unintentionally.

Apparently, he was fond of bringing to school a sandwich made of some pressed turkey loaf that had an uncommon resemblance to brains. It didn't take too many donations during an anatomy unit to make the swap possible.

In defense of my dad's other classmates, this guy was said to have been a real prick, whose professional apogee had occurred 15 years earlier when he built rockets for Hitler.

Wernher von Braun? Or was he one of the slave laborers that assembled the rockets?

One of the junior engineers. Got tired of designing refrigerators in post-War Canada and went to Med school.

Ah, yes. Good old Canada, where the post-WW2 slogan was: "we've never a met a nazi we didn't like".

Shows a lack of imagination. He could have designed fridges to be dropped on London.

I tried frying brains and eating them back in my bachelor days. As I recall, they were a little insipid but not bad. A better chef (almost everybody who can cook) would probably have done better.

My mother said that she commonly ate brains with scrambled eggs in the pre-WWII era. Several of my friends told me their parents were fond of this dish as well.

As a general matter, organ meats and other offbeat body parts of animals seem much less commonly consumed than 50-odd years ago. Tongue was a common delicacy in our house and a great delight. The very thought of it fills my wife and her son with horror. Liver was something we ate very commonly. It was deemed particularly healthful. Again, I don't think nearly as much of it is consumed these days. I don't know how long it's been since I've been in a restaurant that had sweetbreads on the menu. I used to relish them. I used to cook and eat beefheart sometimes. The taste and consistency seemed about halfway between ordinary muscle meat and liver.

I wonder if some of the contemporary aversion to organ meats isn't, perhaps prudently, based on a fear that these have been more contaminated by hormones and other drugs, pesticides and the like.

That would be too rational. I think it has more to do with how far removed people today are from the origin of the foods they eat. We live in a world where you can eat all kinds of meat and veggies and never had any idea how these things look in their natural state or how they got to your plate. People no longer grow foods or kill animals. We buy pre-packaged, processed, sanitized foods without all their bits and pieces. Most North Americans I know (including my wife) won't eat a fish dish if it's served whole with its head, eyes... that would remind them they're eating another animal. Give them a filet of sole or whatever and the're fine. The less fishy the taste the better too. North Americans' voracious appetite for white chicken meat is also part of this phenomenon. Also, people today are very picky eaters because no virtally no one goes hungry anymore whereas before you ate what was served to you and were happy to simply have a meal.