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SHEEP'S HEAD PIE (a breakfast or luncheon dish)
Scald, clean, and boil in the usual way a sheep's head and a gang of trotters. Cut off the meat in neat pieces, and pack these closely in a pie-dish; season with pepper, salt, and finely-minced onion; lay little pieces of butter here and there upon them, and pour over them a little of the liquor in which the head and feet were boiled. Cover the dish with pastry, and bake the pie till it is done enough. Let it get cold, take off the crust, and serve it cut into thin slices like brawn. Garnish with parsley. Time to bake, one hour.
A Victorian cold-cut dish that relies entirely on the gelatine drawn out of the head and feet: it sets in the dish and is sliced like brawn. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to bring a head to the boil, so the useful detail lies in the timings and the liquor.
- The hinge: the liquor must be strong enough to setUse the cooking liquid, and just enough to come partway up the meat rather than to cover it. If it is thin or over-diluted the pie may not slice cleanly, and you will have loose meat under a crust.
- A gang of trottersA set of four sheep's feet. Butchers who sell heads will usually supply them, though both are special-order items in most places now; two pig's trotters give a comparable amount of gelatine if sheep's feet cannot be had.
- Sourcing the headAsk for it split and cleaned, with the brain removed. In the UK and EU the skulls and brains of sheep over twelve months old are classed as specified risk material and are not sold, so what you buy will already be trimmed accordingly.
- "Boil in the usual way"Two and a half to three hours at a bare simmer, until the meat pulls away from the bone. Skim in the first ten minutes; a rolling boil clouds the liquor and coarsens the texture.
- Oven temperatureCassell's gives an hour with no heat. Bake at 400F, which browns the pastry lid and thoroughly heats the already-cooked filling within the hour stated.
- Season above what tastes right hotThe pie is eaten cold, and cold jellied meat swallows salt and pepper. Taste the liquor when it is warm, then season a step further; the minced onion should be very fine so it softens in the baking.
- The crust is a lid, not a componentIt is lifted off and discarded before slicing, so ordinary shortcrust or even a flour-and-water paste will do. Its job is to keep the surface from drying while the pie bakes.
- Setting and yieldChill at least six hours, preferably overnight, before turning out or slicing in the dish. One head with its trotters will roughly fill a pie-dish of a couple of pints; the number of servings depends entirely on how thinly it is sliced.
Sheep's head was among the cheapest meat a nineteenth-century household could buy, and cookery books of the period treat it as a staple rather than a curiosity: boiled with the trotters it yields both broth and a quantity of gelatinous meat for almost nothing. This version is essentially brawn under a crust, brawn being a name applied, in what is in fact a later sense of the word, to cold pressed head meat set in its own jelly, and the instruction to slice it thin and garnish with parsley places it on the cold breakfast or luncheon sideboard alongside potted meats and galantines. The dish makes the point that connective tissue and bone, given long slow moist heat, produce a setting stock without any added isinglass or gelatine. Dishes of this kind faded from British tables through the twentieth century as meat grew cheaper and offal less familiar, though sheep's head broths and stews remain current in Scotland, the Middle East and South Asia.