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, to Prepare Brains For
Wash and clean the brains thoroughly, let them lie in cold water for half an hour, then boil them in vinegar and water for six or eight minutes. After this they may be either minced with the fry, or cut into thin slices and placed between the halves of the head, or chopped small and mixed smoothly with a dessert-spoonful of flour, half a tea-spoonful of salt, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, a tea-spoonful of finely-minced parsley, and about a square inch of thin lemon-rind, finely grated. Work all thoroughly together with a well-beaten egg, have ready a pan of boiling fat, drop the mixture into it from a spoon in small round cakes, and fry them to a bright brown colour. Drain the fat thoroughly from them before serving. Time, three or four minutes to fry the cakes. Probable cost of head, 8d. to 10d.
This is a preparation of sheep's brain, and it is one of the few dishes in the older cookery books that no competent kitchen should attempt. The notes below explain what the instructions assume and why the dish is now off the table.
- Why this cannot be madeBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents concentrate. In sheep the relevant disease is scrapie, and following the BSE epidemic the skull, brain and spinal cord of sheep and goats over twelve months of age were classified as specified risk material and excluded from the human food chain in the UK and EU. Heads and brains from older animals cannot lawfully be sold for food, and the trade in them has largely gone.
- Cooking does not make it safeThe recipe's six to eight minutes in vinegar and water, and the three or four minutes in hot fat, are irrelevant to the hazard. Prions are not proteins that denature at cooking temperatures; they survive normal boiling, frying and even autoclaving at standard settings. There is no time or temperature that turns this into a safe dish.
- The soaking and washing are cosmeticSteeping in cold water and cleaning the brains were done to draw out blood and improve colour and texture. They have no bearing on infectivity, and nothing in the traditional handling of a split head reduces risk.
- No corrected version is offeredFritters of this kind — chopped meat bound with egg and flour, dropped into hot fat and drained — have plenty of modern equivalents made with other ingredients. If you want the dish, work from a current recipe using a different filling rather than substituting into this one.
- Reading the original: "the fry"When the text says the brains "may be either minced with the fry," the fry means the assorted offal that came with the head and pluck — liver, lights, heart, sweetbread — chopped and fried together. It is a noun, not an instruction.
- Reading the original: unitsA dessert-spoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly two teaspoons. The "probable cost of head, 8d. to 10d." is eight to ten old pence, a fraction of a shilling, which tells you the head was among the cheapest things on the butcher's block.
A lamb's or sheep's head was a staple of thrifty Victorian catering: the whole head, split, yielded cheek meat, tongue, brain and the makings of a broth for well under a shilling. Brain fritters and brain sauce appear across nineteenth-century European cookery — cervelles au beurre noir in France, brain sauce for boiled sheep's head in Scotland — and the seasoning here, parsley, pepper, salt and grated lemon rind bound with egg, is the standard Victorian forcemeat flavouring applied to a soft, mild tissue that needs assertive company. The dish had long been in decline in British kitchens before policy finished the job: after BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986 and linked to variant CJD in humans in the 1990s, brain and spinal cord from cattle and then from older sheep and goats were legally excluded from food. What was once the cheapest cut on the counter is now, in regulatory terms, controlled waste.