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 (an English recipe)
Skin the head, split it in halves, and remove the brains. Soak the head in water, and wash it well. Put it into a stewpan with half a pound of pearl barley, pour a gallon of water over it, and let it simmer gently for an hour. Carefully remove the scum as it rises. Throw in a small handful of salt, with two turnips, two carrots, and two onions, and simmer all gently till the flesh of the head is tender. Lift it out, serve it on a dish, and garnish with turnips and carrots. Serve the soup separately in a tureen. If liked, the brains can be made into forcemeat-balls, fried, and served in the soup. To make these, clear the brains of fibre, throw them into boiling water, and boil them for ten minutes. Pound them well with a spoonful of bread-crumbs, a spoonful of flour, a tea-spoonful of finely-shredded parsley, a little grated lemonpeel, a slice of butter, and pepper and salt. Bind the mixture together with the yolks of two eggs, form it into small cakes, and fry these in hot fat till they are brightly browned. Drain them, and add them to the soup. Time, four hours and a half. Probable cost, sheep's head, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient, one head for two or three persons.
The dish is built around a whole sheep's head, brains included, and both the head and the forcemeat-balls fall squarely into material that is no longer permitted in food.
- Brain and skull are specified risk materialSheep and goat skull, brain, eyes, tonsils and spinal cord from animals over twelve months old are classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and are removed at slaughter. The forcemeat-balls in the second half of the recipe cannot legally or safely be made.
- The pathogen is scrapieScrapie is the ovine transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, caused by a misfolded prion that concentrates in central nervous tissue. Prions are not destroyed by the four and a half hours of simmering here, nor by frying, nor by any ordinary domestic cooking temperature.
- Boiling the brains ten minutes does nothingThe recipe's ten-minute blanch is a texture step, to firm the brains for pounding. It has no bearing on prion infectivity, which survives temperatures far above boiling.
- The head itself, not only the brainsRemoving the brains does not make the rest of the head unrestricted: under the rules the skull, not merely its contents, is classed as specified risk material, which is why a whole head is not handled like an ordinary cut.
- Butchers cannot supply itButchers are unlikely to supply it -- A whole sheep's head with the brains in place, from an animal over twelve months old, is not something a licensed butcher in Britain, Ireland or the EU can sell for eating; younger lamb heads fall outside the restriction, but the animal this recipe assumes does not.
- If you want the brothA barley, root vegetable and mutton broth of this shape is entirely makeable from permitted cuts, but use a current recipe rather than adapting this one.
Sheep's head broth belongs to the thrift end of nineteenth-century British cookery, and Cassell's flags it as English, in contrast to the better-known Scottish powsowdie, in which the head was singed rather than skinned and the barley broth was thickened with the trotters. The economics are visible in the entry itself: one and twopence to one and sixpence for a head that fed two or three. Pearl barley, turnip, carrot and onion are the standard scaffolding of the period's household broths, and the trick of serving the meat on a dish with the liquor sent up separately in a tureen let a single cheap ingredient furnish two courses. The brain forcemeat-balls appear across Victorian cookery books in the same offhand way, which is a reminder that the connection between nervous tissue and transmissible spongiform encephalopathy was not understood until the twentieth century, and not acted on in law until the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s.