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, Hashed
Wash the head, split it in halves, and soak it in lukewarm water. Clear the brains from fibre, and leave them in cold water till wanted. Put the head and the tongue into a saucepan with two onions and a bunch of sweet herbs, cover with cold water, let this boil, skim it, and draw the pan to the side of the fire that the head may simmer gentlyuntil done enough. Take it up, cut the flesh into neat slices, flour and pepper these, and put them into a clean saucepan with the two onions that were boiled with them finely minced. Mix a dessert-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste with a little cold water, and stir into it half a pint of the liquor in which the head was boiled. Add a large table-spoonful of any good store sauce, and salt and pepper if required. Pour the sauce over the slices of meat, add a spoonful of minced parsley and a spoonful of brown thickening, and let all simmer gently, without boiling, for half an hour. Serve the hash on a hot dish, and garnish with toasted sippets. Tie the brains in muslin, and boil them for a quarter of an hour. Mince them, and beat them up with a table-spoonful of scalded and chopped parsley, half a cupful of milk, and half a cupful of the liquor in which the head was boiled. Boil this for a few minutes, thicken with flour and butter, and season with pepper and salt. Keep the tongue hot until the last moment. Skin it, lay it in the centre of a dish, pour the brains round, and serve hot. Time, altogether, three hours and a half to four hours. Probable cost, sheep's head, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
This is a two-part dish built on a split sheep's head: a floured hash from the cheek meat, the tongue laid whole in a dish, and the boiled brains beaten into a milk sauce poured round it. The brain component is the reason this page belongs to reading rather than cooking.
- The brains are the problemSheep are subject to scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and the infectious agent in TSEs concentrates in brain, spinal cord and associated nervous tissue. Boiling for a quarter of an hour, or for any length of time, does not inactivate prions; they survive normal cooking temperatures and ordinary disinfection. Nothing in this method reduces the risk.
- Splitting the head spreads itHalving the skull cuts through the top of the spinal cord and can carry nervous tissue onto the cheek meat and into the cooking liquor, even though the recipe lifts the brains out beforehand. The hash and the sauce both use that liquor, so the risk need not be confined to the part of the dish that names brains.
- Specified risk materialFollowing the BSE crisis, the skull including brain and eyes, the spinal cord and the tonsils of sheep and goats over about twelve months old have been classed as specified risk material in the UK and EU and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. A split head from an older sheep is therefore not something a UK or EU butcher can legally supply, though heads are still sold for food elsewhere.
- Terms, for reading"store sauce" is a bottled commercial sauce of the mushroom-ketchup or Worcestershire type; "brown thickening" is a browned flour-and-butter roux kept ready in the larder; "sippets" are small triangles or fingers of toasted bread used as a garnish. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons; half a pint is ten imperial fluid ounces, roughly a cup and a fifth in US measure.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for a braised or hashed lamb or mutton dish from cuts sold for food today, and disregard the brain sauce entirely rather than trying to adapt it.
A sheep's head was one of the cheapest things a Victorian cook could put on a table: the probable cost given here, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. for two or three servings, undercut almost any joint. Sheep's heads were a staple of Scottish and northern English cookery in particular, where singed sheep's head and the barley broth made from it were long-standing town-market food, and the practice of serving the brains as a separate sauce poured round the skinned tongue reflects the period's general habit of using every part of a carcass in a form recognisable at table. The dish disappeared from British cookbooks over the twentieth century for reasons of taste as much as regulation, but the ban on specified risk material after the BSE outbreak, which bars the skull of older sheep, sharply narrowed what could be cooked; it now reads as a record of a whole-animal economy that food safety law has largely closed off.