The Unexpected Midwest Origins Of Fried Brain Sandwiches

Have you ever wanted to embrace your inner zombie and eat brains? Well, you can! While it's not something you'll find on many menus, there are a couple of restaurants in the Midwest that offer up brains as food. According to the Chicago Tribune, the fried brain sandwich originated from the stockyards of East St. Louis, Illinois, a meatpacking town. Slaughtering animals for their meat often left behind less appealing, but still usable parts, and for economical reasons, workers began frying and eating the brains. 

Bars in the area caught on to the trend and started serving fried brain sandwiches, which became a regional favorite for many years. Today, however, few butchers sell brains and even fewer restaurants serve them, but it's still a comfort food for many. Schottzie's Bar and Grill in St. Louis and the Hilltop Inn in Evansville, Indiana are among the rare places you can order brains off the menu.

To prepare a fried brain sandwich, cooks at these restaurants first clean the brains and get rid of any membranes or bones left behind. Then the brains are formed into patties, covered with flour and spices, and fried in oil or lard in a cast-iron skillet. They're served on a bun or toasted marble rye typically with mustard, onions, and pickles. The brains themselves aren't very flavorful, most of it comes from the breading and spices.

Following the discovery of mad cow disease in the 1980s, many restaurants stopped serving brains altogether. Scientifically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, mad cow disease is a fatal infection affecting the brains of cattle, but it can transfer to humans who eat infected beef in the form of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

In lieu of fears over the disease, the USDA banned selling cow brains from cattle more than 30 months old. The restaurants that didn't want to stop serving brains switched to pork brains, although they are smaller and can be harder to work with.

Cow brains aren't the only banned offal in the U.S. It's illegal to eat the lungs of any animal, which is why the traditional Scottish haggis is not available in the states. But if you're looking for other offal to enjoy, look no further than ankimo, a monkfish liver that's a Japanese delicacy.