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 for Invalids
Wash and clean a sheep's head thoroughly, split it in halves, take out the brains, soak it in lukewarm water for an hour or two, dry it, and put it into a stewpan with two pounds of lean beef. Pour three pints of cold water into the pan, and add a small turnip, half a lettuce or endive, a small lump of sugar, a spoonful of made mustard, and a little pepper and salt. Let all simmer gently together for two hours, carefully removing the scum as it rises. Cut the meat from the cheeks into neat pieces, small enough to be put into the mouth without being cut, lay these aside, and cover them to keep them moist. Put the bones and trimmings of the head back into the soup, and stir into it a table-spoonful of fine oatmeal which has been beaten to a smooth paste with a cupful of cold water. Simmer the soup for two hours longer, and strain it. Skim away the fat, put the pieces of meat back into the soup, and stir it over the fire till it is quite hot without boiling. A glassful of port may be thrown into the soup before serving. The tongue and the brains may be served separately. Time, four hours and a half. Probable cost, sheep's head, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for about a pint and a half of soup.
This is a nineteenth-century sickroom broth built on a whole split sheep's head, brains included. The obstacle is not technique but the material itself, which is no longer permitted or advisable food.
- The brains are the problemSheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of the same family as BSE. In the UK, EU and elsewhere the skull including the brain and eyes, and the spinal cord, of sheep above a set age are classed as specified risk material and removed from the food chain rather than sold. There is no cooking step that inactivates a prion; simmering for four and a half hours does nothing to it.
- The head itself is restricted, not just the brainsRegulations in many jurisdictions govern the whole ovine skull of animals above a set age, not merely the tissue inside it. Splitting a head at home defeats the entire purpose of controlled removal, because the cut spreads brain and cord tissue over the cheek meat you intend to eat.
- "Served separately" makes it worse, not betterThe recipe allows the brains and tongue to be served on their own. Serving nervous tissue undiluted to the patient is the worst feature of the method as written.
- The reheating step is unsound on its own termsThe cooked cheek meat is set aside covered, held at room temperature for two further hours of simmering, then returned and warmed "quite hot without boiling." That is a long hold in the bacterial growth range followed by a deliberately gentle reheat, which is the opposite of current practice for cooked meat.
- If you want the dishA mutton or lamb broth thickened with oatmeal is a perfectly good thing and is well covered by current recipes using shoulder, neck or shank. Use one of those rather than adapting this page.
- Reading the original"Made mustard" is prepared mustard from the jar, not dry powder. The costs are pre-decimal: 1s. 2d. is fourteen old pence, and the recipe prices only the head, not the two pounds of lean beef that also go into the pot.
Sheep's head broth was one of the standard economies of the British and especially Scottish kitchen, where powsowdie or sheep's-head broth was a recognised dish and the singed heads of the Edinburgh fleshers were a known trade. Its appearance in Cassell's under invalid cookery reflects a Victorian medical commonplace: that beef tea, calf's foot jelly, brains and other soft, gelatinous, easily swallowed animal foods were restorative, and that a patient who could not chew should still be given meat in some form. Note how carefully the instruction is framed "small enough to be put into the mouth without being cut" and the port added at the end, both signatures of sickroom cookery of the period. The whole category rested on nutritional theory rather than evidence, and the specific risk that makes this version unusable, prion disease in ruminant nervous tissue, was not understood until well over a century later.