Home › Meats › Lamb's Head To Fricassee
Lamb's Head To Fricassee
Parboil the head and haslet; when done enough, cut in nice slices; also slice the tongue and heart, and fricassee as for chicken. Fry the sweetbreads and liver together, also some nice slices of bacon and a few bunches of parsley. Place the fricassee on a dish and garnish with the fried pieces.
A whole-head-and-pluck dish written for cooks who bought the whole animal and were expected to know what a fricassee was. The gaps are worth filling before you shop.
- HasletThe haslet (also harslet or pluck) is the edible viscera taken out with the head — heart, liver, lungs and the connecting tissue. Lights (lungs) cannot be sold for food in the United States, so in practice you are working with heart, liver, tongue and sweetbreads.
- Fricassee as for chickenIn books of this period the usual sense is gently stewing the cooked meat in its own strained broth, thickened with butter and flour and finished with cream, sometimes with an egg yolk beaten with lemon juice stirred in off the heat. That is the white fricassee; brown fricassees, floured and coloured in the pan, also appear in period books, so check the poultry chapter this recipe is pointing you to.
- Sourcing the headOrder it split in half lengthwise and ask the butcher to remove the eyes. Sheep skull and brain from animals over twelve months are classed as specified risk material under TSE rules in the UK and EU, so a split head may not be available; the recipe uses no brain in any case.
- Parboiling"When done enough" is roughly 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer with an onion, a bay leaf and peppercorns. The tongue goes in with it and must be peeled the moment it comes out, while hot, or the skin sets fast.
- SweetbreadsSweetbreads are the thymus, and the name is also applied to the pancreas. Soak them in several changes of cold water for an hour or two, blanch briefly, then slip off the membrane and press between two plates under a weight before frying — otherwise they fall apart in the pan.
- Fried parsleyUse flat bunches with the stalks trimmed short, dried thoroughly on a towel, dropped into fat at 350–375F for about 15 to 20 seconds until the sizzling stops. Wet parsley spits violently and limp parsley is the usual reason the garnish looks grey rather than bright green.
- YieldOne head with its haslet will serve perhaps three or four as a main course, depending on how much came with the pluck, and stretches further if served over rice or with boiled potatoes to take the sauce.
Head-and-pluck cookery of this kind survived in household manuals long after middle-class cooks had stopped doing it, because it belonged to a way of buying meat in which nothing left the butcher's block unsold. The fricassee treatment — parboil, slice, reheat in a pale thickened broth — was often used as a genteel disguise for cheap and awkward cuts in the nineteenth century, and the instruction to "fricassee as for chicken" assumes the reader has already met the method under poultry. The fried garnish of sweetbreads, liver, bacon and parsley is doing the work of presentation: the delicate parts get the crisp treatment and are arranged around the rim, which is how a dish of boiled offal became something you could carry to a table. Scotland and the north of England kept sheep's head broth and singed sheep's head in circulation well into the twentieth century.