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, Curried
Clean a sheep's head thoroughly, remove the brains, and boil till tender. Cut the meat from the bones and divide it into neat slices; skin the tongue, and slice it also. Put the pieces in a saucepan, moisten with the liquor in which the head was boiled, and cover the pan until the gravy is made. Mince two onions, and fry them in a little butter, stirring them briskly over the fire till they are soft. If the acid flavour is liked, a sour apple may be minced and fried with them. Mix a tea-spoonful of curry-powder and a tea-spoonful of curry-paste smoothly with a little milk, add three-quarters of a pint of the broth in which the head was boiled, and pour the liquor over the onions. Let them simmer a few minutes, then rub the whole through a sieve. Wash the brains, free them from fibre, tie them in muslin, and let them boil for a quarter of an hour. Beat them smoothly, mix with them a table-spoonful of flour and three table-spoonfuls of new milk, and stir them into the curry sauce. Stir the mixture gently till it boils, strain it over the meat, add a little salt, and simmer the curry for a few minutes without letting it boil. Serve on a hot dish, and send rice boiled for curry to table with the sheep's head. Time, three hours and a half. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is a Victorian household curry built on the cheapest cut in the butcher's shop, but the sauce is thickened with sheep's brain and that puts it outside what can be made today. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than offering a workaround.
- Why the brains are the problemSheep are subject to scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and the infectious agent concentrates in brain, spinal cord and other central nervous tissue. There is no cooking temperature or time that reliably destroys prions; the quarter-hour boil in muslin does nothing to them.
- The head is nervous tissue tooThe recipe treats the skull as a source of cheap meat, but a sheep's head carries brain, eyes, trigeminal ganglia and the top of the spinal cord. Removing the brains does not make the rest of the head a clean cut, which is why specified risk material controls in the UK and EU restricted the sale of whole ovine heads from older animals.
- Not the same as ordinary offalLiver, kidney, heart and tongue from a modern inspected carcass are a different matter and remain on sale. The objection here is narrowly to central nervous system tissue and to the intact head, not to offal cookery in general.
- Curry-paste and curry-powderBoth were commercial products of the period, sold in jars and tins by firms such as Crosse & Blackwell and their competitors. Victorian pastes typically carried oil along with souring and savoury elements such as tamarind and often anchovy or shrimp; the powder was the dry blend. A modern equivalent would be a jarred curry paste plus a mild madras powder.
- Units, if you are reading rather than cookingThree-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz, or about 425 ml on the imperial measure this book uses. "New milk" is fresh whole milk, as opposed to skimmed or the previous day's. Two shillings was a real but modest sum for a dish feeding three.
- If you want the dishA current recipe using shoulder or neck of lamb will give you the same spiced, onion-and-apple sauce over rice, which is where the character of this curry actually lies. Use one rather than adapting this.
Sheep's head was a byword for thrifty meat in nineteenth-century Britain, cheap enough to sit below even the coarsest joints, and Scottish powsowdie and sheep's-head broth were built on the same economy. The book places it here in a curry because by the 1870s Anglo-Indian curry was a common household treatment for meat that needed help: bottled curry-powder and curry-paste were widely sold, and cookery writers often proposed them for cold mutton, rabbit, tripe and heads. The sour apple fried with the onions is characteristic of British curry cookery, and is usually read as standing in for a souring agent such as tamarind or green mango; apple persisted in twentieth-century "curried mince" long after the sheep's head had gone. What dates the recipe most sharply is the use of brain as a thickener; the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 90s and the subsequent controls on specified risk material ended that practice in Britain and much of Europe.