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 BROTH (a Scottish recipe)
Take a large fat young head and a "gang" of trotters, all carefully singed. Wash and scrape them well, and let them soak in cold water for an hour or two. Take out the eyes, split the head into halves, and remove the brains. Shorten the jaw-bones where there is no flesh, and cut out the gristle inside the nose. Prepare the trotters for dressing (see SHEEP'S TROTTERS), wash and brush both head and feet once more, and leave them in water till wanted. Put the two halves of the head together, and tie a string round it to keep the brains and the tongue in their proper places. Lay it in a saucepan with a pound or two of the scrag end of a neck of mutton, a large cupful of barley, and about half a pint of dried peas which have been soaked in cold water. Pour over all a gallon of water, and add a little salt; boil the contents of the stewpan very gently, and carefully remove the scum as it rises. When the head has boiled an hour, put in the trotters, and at the end of two hours, add two carrots, two turnips, and two onions, all sliced together, with a few sticks of celery, if liked. Boil the head three hours or three hours and a half longer, and remember that the more slowly it is boiled the better will be both head and soup. Serve the head with the trotters round it on a dish, and garnish with boiled carrots and turnips. Serve the soup in a tureen. Sometimes the brains are not put inside the head, but are thrown into the broth when it is boiling, simmered for a quarter of an hour, and then served on a separate dish, with brown sauce poured over them. If the sheep's tongues are not wanted immediately, let them cool in the broth. When they are to be served, warm them up in the same, cut them in halves without separating them, and lay them open on a dish. Send piquant sauce to table with them. Time, five to six hours to simmer the sheep's head. Probable cost, sheep's head, from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient, one head for two or three persons.
This is a full Scottish broth built on parts of the sheep that modern food law treats as controlled waste rather than food. The reading notes below explain the barrier and decode the archaic terms; they are not a route to making the dish.
- The brains are the fatal problemThe brains are the reason to stop -- Sheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and the brain and spinal cord are where the infectious prion concentrates. Scrapie itself has not been shown to infect humans, but BSE in sheep cannot be excluded, which is why these tissues are controlled. Prions are not destroyed by hours of simmering, so nothing in the method reduces the hazard.
- The skull itself is regulatedIn the UK and EU the skull, brain and spinal cord of ovine animals over twelve months old are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed, not sold for food. Heads from older sheep are therefore off the market, and even where a young lamb's head falls outside the rules it is not a routine butcher's line.
- The quarter-hour simmer for the brainsThe variant that throws the brains loose into the boiling broth and serves them under brown sauce is the worst version: it seeds the entire pot of soup and the mutton with the same tissue. Use a current recipe for Scotch broth if you want the barley-and-root-vegetable soup.
- "A gang of trotters"A gang is the full set of four feet from one animal. Sheep's trotters themselves are not nervous-system tissue, though they are now a specialist order rather than a routine butcher's line.
- Scrag endThe bony neck end of the mutton carcass, sold cheap for stewing. It is still obtainable as lamb neck, and it is the part of this recipe doing most of the flavouring work.
- The old units and pricesHalf a pint of dried peas is a UK pint measure, so about 10 fl oz by volume. The head is costed at 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d., which marks it as a cheap dish.
- YieldThe book reckons one head for two or three people at table, with the broth served separately in a tureen and the head and trotters dished with boiled carrots and turnips.
Sheep's head broth, or powsowdie in older Scots usage, belongs to a tradition of whole-carcass cookery in which the head, feet and neck of a sheep fed a family cheaply. The singeing the recipe takes for granted was often done by a specialist rather than at home, and singed sheep's heads were a recognised trade in nineteenth-century Edinburgh. Barley and dried peas are a common pair in Scottish broth-making, thickening the liquid as much as flavouring it, and the same combination survives in Scotch broth today. The specified risk material rules that make the dish unmakeable followed the BSE epidemic of the late twentieth century, roughly a century after this text was compiled.