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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Sheep's Brains and Tongue
Take the brains out of the head without breaking them, soak them in salted water for an hour, skin them, and pick away the fibres. Throw the brains into boiling water, also the tongue, already boiled with the head. Let the brains boil quickly for a quarter of an hour; take them out, mince them, and beat them up with three table-spoonfuls of the liquor in which they were boiled, three table-spoonfuls of cream, a table-spoonful of blanched and chopped parsley, and a little pepper and salt. Boil the brains with half a tea-spoonful of white thickening; or, failing this, with a small piece of butter rolled in flour. Skin the tongue, put it in the centre of a small dish, pour the brains round it, and serve very hot. Time, altogether, thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, sheep's heads, 10d. to 1s. each. Sufficient for one or two persons.
This dish is built around sheep's brain, which is regulated as specified risk material in most countries and cannot be prepared safely at home. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a workaround.
- Prion disease, not spoilageBrain and spinal cord are the tissues in which transmissible spongiform encephalopathies concentrate — scrapie in sheep, BSE in cattle. The infectious agent is a misfolded protein, not a microbe, and it is not destroyed by the quarter-hour boil here or by any domestic cooking temperature.
- The tissue is legally restrictedFollowing the BSE epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, the skull, brain and spinal cord of sheep and goats over a certain age were classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and must be removed and destroyed at slaughter. Whole sheep's heads with the brain still in place are not generally available from ordinary butchers.
- Nothing in the method reduces the riskSoaking in salted water, skinning and picking away the fibres are cosmetic steps aimed at appearance and texture. They do not remove nervous tissue in any meaningful sense, and mincing and beating the brains only distributes it through the sauce.
- The tongue is not a substitute routeThe tongue is boiled with the head, so it shares the same handling and the same butchery. A recipe that begins with an intact sheep's head cannot be salvaged by using only part of it.
- If you want the dish this replacesCassell's uses the brains as a soft, creamy garnish poured round a whole skinned tongue set in the centre of the dish. A current recipe for boiled or braised lamb's tongue, from a source written under modern meat regulations, is the thing to cook instead.
- On the archaic terms"White thickening" is a pale flour-and-butter roux kept from colouring, and the "probable cost" of 10d. to 1s. is pre-decimal — roughly four to five pence in today's coinage, though the purchasing power was many times that.
Cassell's belongs to a tradition of Victorian household manuals that treated a sheep's head as a serious economy purchase: cheaply bought, it yielded broth, tongue, cheek meat and brains, and cookbooks of the period devote several consecutive entries to using up each part. Brains were valued for their softness and often appear as a sauce or a garnish rather than as a portion in their own right — poached, minced, loosened with cream and cooking liquor, and spooned around something firmer, exactly as here — though they were also served as dishes in their own right. That whole category of cookery effectively ended in Britain in the 1990s, when the link between BSE in cattle and variant CJD in humans led to the removal of brain and spinal cord from the food chain in cattle and, on the precautionary grounds of scrapie, in older sheep and goats as well. Recipes like this one now read as a record of how completely a food safety crisis can erase a familiar dish.