Cut a sheep's liver into pieces and stew with the sheep's head in 4 quarts of water. Add sliced onions, sliced leeks, carrots, turnips, parsley and thyme, salt, pepper and a few cloves. Let all cook until tender; then strain. Let stand until cool. Skim off the fat; heat and mix with flour until brown; let boil. Add a glass of white wine. Cook all together and serve hot.
A sheep's-head broth of the old Scottish kind, thickened at the end with a brown roux made from its own skimmed fat. The original assumes you know how to handle a head; most of the work is in the preparation it does not mention.
- The hinge: cook the liver separatelyLiver put in at the start with a head that needs three hours will be grey, grainy and bitter, and it will cloud the broth. Simmer the head first and add the liver only for the last 30 to 40 minutes, or poach it apart and add it to the strained soup.
- Sourcing the headSheep's heads are a special order from a halal or traditional butcher and are usually sold split. In the UK and EU the skull, brain and eyes of sheep over twelve months of age are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold, so a head offered for sale will generally come from a young lamb. A mixture of lamb neck, shank and a little liver gives a broth of the same character if no head is available.
- Preparation the recipe skipsA head must be scraped, the ears and nostrils cleaned, any wool singed off, and then soaked in cold salted water for several hours or overnight, changing the water. Blanch it, drain and rinse before it goes into the 4 quarts of fresh water, or the finished soup will taste muddy.
- Cooking time"Until tender" for a lamb's head is 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil. The meat should pull from the cheek and jaw easily; pick it off before you discard the bones rather than throwing the meat away with them.
- "Heat and mix with flour until brown"This is a brown roux made in a pan from the fat you skimmed: roughly 3 tablespoons fat to 3 tablespoons flour, cooked until the colour of a hazelnut, then the hot broth whisked in gradually. Adding flour directly to the pot gives lumps.
- A glass of wineA wine glass in older cookbooks is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup, though the term was never standardised. Let it boil a couple of minutes with the thickened soup to take the raw edge off the wine.
- Seasonings and quantities"A few cloves" means three or four, and they are easier to retrieve if stuck into an onion half. Two onions, two leeks, two carrots and a small turnip suit 4 quarts of water; a handful of pearl barley is traditional in Scottish broths of this type and thickens it further.
- YieldFour quarts of liquid, reduced somewhat in cooking, serves eight generously as a first course or six as a meal with the picked meat returned to the pot.
Sheep's-head broth was a staple of Scottish thrift cookery, known in Edinburgh and the Lowlands as powsowdie and closely related to the barley-and-mutton soup the rest of the world calls Scotch broth. A singed sheep's head was cheap, and boiling it for hours turned gelatinous, awkward cuts into a rich soup; the smell of heads being singed was for a long time associated with Scottish butchers' shops and with Edinburgh's Sunday dinners. It is tempting to read the dish's inclusion as a book organised by nation needing one recipe to stand for Scotland, though that is guesswork. The white wine and brown roux at the end sit closer to French practice than to any cottage version, and one might see in them how these international collections smoothed regional food into a single hotel-kitchen idiom. Heads fell out of general use in Britain after BSE controls, the cattle restrictions of the 1990s followed by restrictions on ovine skulls as specified risk material in the early 2000s, which is why the recipe now reads as remote.