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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Lamb Brains and Tongue
Take the tongue from the head after it has been boiled, and put it into a saucepan with as much cold water as will cover it. Wash the brains in lukewarm water, pick the fibres from them, and tie them in a piece of muslin, with a dessert-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, and boil all together for a quarter of an hour. Take out the brains, chop them small, season them with a little pepper and salt, and put them into a saucepan with a quarter of a pint of cream, and half an ounce of fresh butter rolled in flour. Stir them over the fire, and let them boil a minute or two, then skin the tongue, place it on a hot dish, and serve the brains round it. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for one person.
This is a head-cookery dish of the kind that assumed a whole sheep's head had come into the kitchen. The brains make it unmakeable now, and the reasons are worth setting out plainly.
- Why the brains rule this outBrain and spinal cord are the tissues that carry the infectious prion in transmissible spongiform encephalopathies — BSE in cattle, scrapie in sheep and goats. Prions are not destroyed by boiling, by the quarter-hour given here or by any domestic cooking. Human variant CJD is untreatable and invariably fatal.
- Specified risk materialSince the BSE crisis of the 1990s, the skull, brain and spinal cord of sheep and goats over twelve months of age have been classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. Brains from animals under that age fall outside the rule, and lamb brains are still sold legally in a number of countries, though the trade is controlled.
- The head itselfThe recipe presumes a boiled sheep's head, split so the brain cavity can be reached; where the animal is over twelve months that splitting is itself a controlled step. The tongue was simply the by-product of that same head.
- If you want the tongueLamb's tongue on its own is still sold and still eaten, but take the method from a current recipe rather than adapting this one, which is written throughout around the head and the brains.
- Reading the old measuresA quarter of a pint is an imperial quarter-pint, five fluid ounces, a little over half a US cup. "Half an ounce of fresh butter rolled in flour" is beurre manié, butter kneaded with flour and dropped into the liquid to thicken it as it melts.
- "Probable cost, 10d."Tenpence in pre-decimal money, a twenty-fourth of a pound. Cassell's costed nearly every entry this way; offal and head meat came in at the very bottom of the scale.
Cassell's belongs to a period when a butcher sold the whole animal and a sheep's head was among the cheapest things in the shop — the head yielded tongue, cheek, brains and the basis of a broth, and cookery books gave each part its own treatment. Brains dressed in cream with parsley, or crumbed and fried, appear in Victorian British and French cookery alike, valued for being soft and mild. The whole tradition ended abruptly. The identification of BSE in British cattle in 1986 and its link to variant CJD, announced in 1996, led to bans on brain and spinal cord entering the food chain, and although the causative agent of scrapie in sheep has never been shown to infect humans, ovine nervous tissue was swept into the same precautionary controls. A dish costed at tenpence and reckoned sufficient for one person is now, in most of Europe, not a food at all.