Notable Sandwiches #71: Fried Brain
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my noble editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the ever-shifting document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, the American Midwest brings us … the fried brain sandwich.
I’ve never knowingly eaten a brain. Liver, yes, kidneys, yes — and giblets, and sweetbreads, sliced tongue, skewered heart. I also have a fondness for the butcher’s melange — paté de campagne, terrines in cans, headcheese, scrapple — the stuff of ingenuity and need, which might well add an errant lobe or node or cortex into that unguessable mix. Organ meats remind you that you’re eating something that was killed for you: they have an iron tang, mineral and a little bloody, too sharp for delicate sensibilities. You can’t have meat without death, the blade or the bolt at the end of the long trot to the killing floor. Organ meats don’t let you forget it; they embody the act of consumption in a way that a pale whole chicken breast or a slab of steak doesn’t; the hidden parts of the animal’s body, the things that let it process toxins or urine or pump blood, make that death your responsibility, the instrument of your hunger.
I feel no compunction at eating the meat of animals raised for slaughter. But to eat a brain which once directed limbs and fear and animal lust is a completion of the process more thorough than I’ve yet attempted — maybe due to cowardice or fear of disease or a smidgeon of shame. But in Evansville, Indiana, the fried brain sandwich is a staple served on a bun.
The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription:
It would be very easy to abandon the gruesome and spongy details of this sandwich and just use it as a metaphor. My brain is fried; I have a terrible headache; I am exhausted with myself and with work, tethered by a fraying cord of love and the remnants of my curiosity. I’ve always relied on my brain to get me somewhere and lately it’s been eating me alive instead, an ouroboros with poison in its fangs. Some days I would gladly extract that demon organ and serve it up to anyone who wanted it, battered on a bun.
A man named Shane Ritz who lives in Evansville, Indiana, bought a fried brain sandwich because I asked him to. He’s thirty and has lived in Evansville for eleven years. Each year since 1921, the town has played host to the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival (yes, that is really its name), originally the idea of local merchants hoping to drum up more trade, and currently one of the largest street festivals in the United States. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually and it is going on right now, as I write this. On the banks of the Ohio River they are lining up for delicacies: pronto pups (unsweetened corn dogs), alligator stew, and fried brain sandwiches, the signature dish of the town and of the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival.
“Despite it being 4:30 PM on a work day — and with booth after booth lining the road for blocks with tons of legitimately good food — there was a 30-minute line for the Brain Booth,” Ritz told me. The brain sandwiches are served out of a beige food truck with big black wheels and free ketchup. “My best attempt at describing the flavor and consistency is that it tastes and feels as if some mushy fat has been fried alongside some pork,” says Ritz. “The flavor is basically ‘fried.’”
It used to be cow brains but then the possibility of bovine spongiform encephalopathy — mad cow disease — which emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century in the UK, roared into the popular consciousness of the globe in the ‘90s and oughts. Eating the brain of an animal infected with mad cow disease can cause a syndrome called Variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, which drives you rapidly and uncontrollably into dementia, makes touch painful, gives you hallucinations; you die within a year. So the sandwich makers switched to pork, as spongiform encephalopathy is bovine, not porcine. Pigs are smarter but have smaller brains, so more needed for each sandwich. Still the tradition went on.
The West Side Nut Club Fall Festival has served brain sandwiches continually for nearly a century — excluding the pauses caused by World War II and the covid-19 epidemic of 2020. First served in St. Louis, where stockyards and killing floors were numerous, the fried brain sandwich spread throughout the Ohio River Valley. But the demand is strongest in Evansville, and few restaurants outside that city still serve the dish; relatively few inside city limits, too. It’s only this week in autumn that they are turned out by the hundred, by the thousand, a patty of battered brain to crush in the mouth.
If I sound tired or gruesome it’s because I am. I laughed when I read the sandwich I was to chronicle this week and it was bitter laughter; hot oil couldn’t cure what ails me, I’m a ghost haunting myself. My brain is fried. And so are those of so many pigs in the Ohio River Valley. I’ve never felt guilty for eating meat. When I worked on a ranch for a summer I watched a cow get shot in the forehead, I saw its blood on the ground and later that day I served its liver up with onions, I poured the rest into a blender and made paté with red wine. The bull lowed at the fence all night where the blood was on the ground. I have peeled skin from tongue, membrane from livers, streaked blood on my cabinets, and felt only hunger. Still I would hesitate to eat a brain on a plate. Everyone is permitted their own squeamishness, and I would see too much of myself in that sliced and battered organ on a bun.
The Ohio River where Evansville sits on the banks is a thousand miles long and the most polluted river in the country. Its waters run with nitrates, mercury, carcinogens sloughed off by DuPont, farm runoff, the slurry that comes from making steel — slag and naptha. It’s autumn there, fried brain season, and here it’s autumn too. Everything is dying into its winter quiet — the vines are down to their woody stems, branches denuded by wind until only the thorns are left, clinging to walls and waiting. From the cold hollow of myself I hope to come out someday too, the brain smashed and self-devoured and worked-over but still alive, still working. Fried but not salted or served on a bun. Waiting until the winter ends and hoping it does and it can.
