Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Brawn of Ox Head
Put a half ox head, two onions, carrots, turnips, and a little celery seed into a pan, with sufficient water to cover; let it simmer until quite tender. Take all the meat from the cheek, season with pepper and salt, and cut into small neat pieces. Fill a brawn mould or cake tin, add the brains and a good sprinkling of minced ham or bacon, and more seasoning. When the mould is full add about a tea-cupful of the stock in which it was boiled; put a plate over with a weight on top, and turn out when quite cold. Garnish with watercress. The liquor makes excellent soup. Probable cost, 8d. per pound.
This is a head cheese of the standard Victorian type, and the note prefacing it in this edition is correct: the brains make it unmakeable today. The points below explain what specifically fails and what the older language means.
- The brains are the problemBovine brain and spinal cord are classed as specified risk material because they can carry the prion that causes BSE, and the human form, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, is untreatable and fatal. Cooking does not destroy prions; simmering the head until tender leaves any infectivity intact.
- The whole head, not just the brainsThe skull, brain, eyes and spinal cord of cattle over a certain age are removed from the food chain by law in the UK, EU and elsewhere, and a butcher cannot legally sell you a half ox head with the brain in place. Cheek meat is sold separately for this reason, having been trimmed clear of nervous tissue under inspection.
- Setting without added gelatineThe dish relies on collagen from the head dissolving into the stock and setting the pressed meat as it chills. A teacupful of stock is roughly five to six fluid ounces. The recipe says only to turn out the brawn 'when quite cold' and gives no chilling instruction, and a large weighted mould of warm meat left to reach room temperature can sit for hours in the range where Clostridium perfringens multiplies in cooked meat.
- What a brawn mould isA deep, straight-sided metal mould, hinged or plain. Cassell's offers a cake tin as the substitute, which suggests the shape mattered more than the vessel.
- Reading the priceEightpence a pound is a low price for cooked meat. An ox head was offal, bought cheaply, and the yield of a half head would be several pounds of pressed meat plus the stock for soup.
- If you want head cheeseUse a current recipe built on inspected pork or beef cheek, with measured chilling. Nothing in this entry should be adapted.
Brawn is one of the oldest surviving English preparations; the word derives from a term for muscle or the fleshy part of a limb, and in English came to mean boar's flesh before it narrowed to the pressed, jellied meat of a boiled head. The French fromage de tête and the American head cheese are the same idea, and many European butchering traditions have a version, since a head is bony, awkward and full of collagen and rewards little but long boiling. A half ox head cost almost nothing, produced pounds of eatable meat, and left behind a rich stock that the entry pointedly declines to waste. The addition of brains to the mould appears in a number of nineteenth-century versions, brain being soft, mild and cheap; British and European rules on specified risk material, brought in after the BSE epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s, ended that practice.