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.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lamb's Heads, Stewed
Lamb's Heads, Stewed
Cook two lamb's heads in salted water until the bones can be removed. Remove the bones and brains, and replace the heads in the pan with a table-spoonful each of chopped parsley and onion, the grated rind of one lemon, salt to taste, and a pinch of nutmeg. Stew over a slow fire for forty minutes. Cut up the heads in even pieces, and place in the centre of a hot dish. Fry and cut up the brains, and place them round the dish along with the tongue cut into slices. Make a sauce with half a pint of the liquor, three well-beaten yolks of eggs, the juice of half a lemon, and a tea-spoonful of flour. Stir until thickened, and pour over.
This dish cannot be reproduced today, and the obstacle is not the technique but the material itself. The points below explain what specifically rules it out.
- Brain is a specified risk materialSince the BSE controls of the later 1990s, the skull including the brain, and the spinal cord, of sheep and goats over twelve months old (or with a permanent incisor erupted through the gum) have been classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and must be removed and destroyed at slaughter rather than sold for food. Animals slaughtered as lamb are usually under that age and so fall outside the age threshold, but nervous tissue from sheep is now tightly controlled and is not ordinary retail material.
- Transmissible spongiform encephalopathySheep carry their own TSE, scrapie, and experimental work in the BSE period showed sheep could be infected with the cattle agent, which is why ovine nervous tissue was regulated alongside bovine. Prions are not destroyed by ordinary cooking; the forty-minute stew here does nothing to them.
- The head itselfWhere sheep and lamb heads are sold, they are commonly supplied halved and with the brain already removed. Availability varies by butcher and market, and a whole head with the cranium intact is not a routine retail item.
- The tongue is a separate matterLamb's tongue is not restricted tissue and is still sold and eaten. If the appeal of this page is the tongue rather than the head, look for a current recipe for it rather than adapting this one.
- The egg-yolk sauceHalf a pint of the cooking liquor thickened with three yolks and a teaspoon of flour is a liaison, not a boiled sauce — it is the same principle as a blanquette finish. The instruction to stir until thickened means holding it below a simmer; taken to the boil the yolks curdle.
- ScaleTwo heads with tongues would have made a substantial dish for a family table, though the recipe states no yield. Offal was cheap protein in a Victorian household rather than a curiosity.
Cassell's gives head recipes as a matter of course because a late-Victorian kitchen bought the whole animal's worth of edible parts and was judged on wasting none of it. Sheep's and lamb's heads were among the cheapest meat available in British towns, and the treatment here — long boil, bone out, a green-and-lemon seasoning, then a rich yolk liaison — is the standard way of dressing them upward for a middle-class table, closely related to the older sheep's-head broth of Scottish and northern English cookery. The dish appears to have persisted in Britain into the twentieth century and remains alive in other cuisines, from Norwegian smalahove to Moroccan bouzellouf, though almost always now without the brain, which the BSE-era controls removed from legal sale. Its disappearance from British home cooking may owe something to that regulation, though the broader collapse of British appetite for offal is at least as likely an explanation.