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 Head, Boiled, with Vegetables
Clean the head, split it, take out the brains, and soak it in lukewarm water. Tie the halves together with string, put the head into a saucepan, and pour over it as much cold water as will cover it. Bring this to the boil, skim carefully, and then simmer gently for an hour-Throw into the liquor two turnips, two carrots, two onions, two parsnips, a small bunch of parsley, and a little pepper and salt. Mix four ounces of oatmeal smoothly with a little of the liquor, stir it into the rest, let it boil, then cover the saucepan closely, and simmer all gently together until done enough. Take up the head, and remove the tongue, which should be served with the brains on a separate dish (see SHEEP'S BRAINS AND TONGUE). Put the head on a dish, place the vegetables round it, and serve hot. The broth may be used for soup. Time, about two hours and a half. Probable cost, sheep's head, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is a working recipe for a whole split sheep's head, and the central problem is not the technique but the material. The brains and the tissue around the skull cavity are the reason it cannot be followed today.
- The brains are the problemSheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of the same family as BSE in cattle. Brain, skull, spinal cord and eyes are the tissues in which the infectious prion protein concentrates, and no amount of simmering inactivates it — prions survive ordinary cooking and even autoclaving.
- Splitting the skull spreads itThe instruction to split the head and take out the brains is exactly the step food-safety rules were written to prevent. Sawing or cleaving the cranium sprays nervous tissue across the meat, so the risk is not confined to the dish of brains served separately.
- It is not simply a matter of choiceIn the UK and EU, the skull including brain and eyes of sheep over twelve months, and the spinal cord, are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. A mature sheep's head of the kind this recipe assumes is therefore not lawfully available with brains in place; heads from animals under twelve months fall outside that rule, but are rarely sold whole and undressed.
- The tongue is treated as part of the same dishThe recipe sends the tongue to the table alongside the brains, cross-referenced to another entry. Even where tongue itself is unobjectionable, the preparation here depends on butchering the head intact, which is where the hazard lies.
- If you want the brothThe oatmeal-thickened vegetable broth described at the end is the appealing part of this recipe, and it belongs to a whole family of Scottish and northern English mutton broths. Use a current recipe built on neck, shank or shoulder rather than adapting this one.
- On the costing"1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d." is fourteen to eighteen pence in pre-decimal money, cheap enough that the recipe reckons it will feed two or three people, which is why the head was worth the trouble.
The boiled sheep's head belongs to the frugal end of British cookery, where nothing from a carcass was left unused and the cheapest cuts fed the most people. It is closely related to powsowdie, the Scots name for sheep's-head broth, long associated with Scotland, where singeing the head to burn off the wool was a recognised trade — Edinburgh is reported to have had its head-singers into the nineteenth century. The four ounces of oatmeal here do the work that flour or barley would do further south, thickening the liquor into something between a soup and a stew so that one head stretches to a full meal for two or three. Cassell's includes it among the plain, economical entries that make up much of the dictionary's bulk: not company food, but the sort of thing a household cook was expected to be able to manage from whatever the butcher had left. Sheep's-head broth survived in domestic cookery well into the twentieth century, declined with changing tastes, and became effectively unobtainable after the BSE-era controls on skull and nervous tissue, which is why the dish now reads as a historical document rather than a set of instructions.