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's Head and Mince
Scald, scrape, and wash the head thoroughly, and put both it and the fry into a stewpan, with a large onion stuck with three cloves, two bunches of parsley, a bunch of thyme, a carrot, a turnip, a bay-leaf, half a dozen peppercorns, a table-spoonful of salt, and two quarts of cold water. Let them boil up quickly, remove the scum as it rises, and simmer gently for an hour. Divide the head, take out the tongue and brains, and fold the two halves in a cloth to dry. Mince the heart, liver, half of the lights, the brains and the tongue (first taking off the skin), very finely. Season with a tea-spoonful of salt, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, and three or four grates of a nutmeg; put the meat into a sauce-pan with three-quarters of a pint of the strained gravy thickened with three ounces of butter rolled in flour, and add a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Cover the saucepan closely and simmer gently for half an hour; stir every now and then, to prevent the contents sticking. Brush the head over with beaten egg, sprinkle finely-grated bread-crumbs over it, and bake in a moderate oven, or place it before the fire, and let it remain until lightly browned, basting liberally with good dripping. Place the head in the middle of a hot dish, put the mince round, and garnish with parsley. The juice of a lemon should be squeezed over the head at the last moment. Time, two hours. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
This is a Victorian whole-head dish built around the "fry" — the pluck, or edible offal, that came home with the head from the butcher. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reasons are worth setting out precisely.
- Brain and skull are specified risk materialBrain and skull are controlled tissue -- Under UK and EU rules the skull, brain and spinal cord of sheep over twelve months of age are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed, precisely because transmissible spongiform encephalopathies concentrate in nervous tissue. Brains from younger lambs fall outside that category, but a split, brain-in head of the kind this recipe assumes is far harder to obtain than it was.
- Scrapie, not only BSESheep carry their own TSE, scrapie, and were potentially exposed to BSE-contaminated feed during the British epidemic, although no natural case of BSE in sheep has been confirmed. The precautionary controls on ovine nervous tissue exist in part because no cooking temperature reliably inactivates a prion; roasting, simmering and browning do nothing to it.
- "Lights" are lungsThe recipe minces half the lights along with heart, liver, brains and tongue. Lung is prohibited in human food in the United States, chiefly because material aspirated during slaughter cannot be reliably cleared from the airways; it remains legal and is still eaten in parts of Europe.
- The fry no longer arrives wholeA Victorian household bought head and pluck together as one cheap unit. Modern slaughter separates and largely condemns those parts, so the recipe's economy — 3s. for six people — has no modern equivalent to reconstruct.
- If you want the idea, not the dishBraised lamb tongue and a lamb's heart mince are both still made from parts that remain legally and safely available. Use a current recipe for those rather than adapting this one.
- Reading the original"Butter rolled in flour" is beurre manié, kneaded raw and dropped into the liquid to thicken it; mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice extract, not a tomato sauce; three-quarters of a pint here is the imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, so about 15 ounces of stock.
Head-and-mince dishes were a staple of nineteenth-century British thrift cookery, and calf's head in particular was grand enough for a dinner party. The lamb's version was the humbler domestic cousin: one animal's head and pluck fed six, the cooking liquor doubled as the sauce, and nothing was discarded. The recipe demonstrates a whole cluster of techniques at once — blanching and scraping, a court-bouillon of onion stuck with cloves and a bundle of herbs, a thickened gravy from the same pot, then egg-and-crumb and browning either in the oven or on a dish set before the open fire, which is what "place it before the fire" means. That last instruction points to a kitchen where the range and the hearth were both working tools. The dish's disappearance has as much to do with regulation as with taste: the BSE controls of the late 1980s and 1990s ended the domestic trade in cattle heads and brains in Britain, and the offal counter that made this recipe possible has not returned.