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 Soup
Take two sheep's heads, wash, split, and soak them in lukewarm water, remove the brains, and put them into a stewpan with a bunch of sweet herbs, two carrots, a turnip, two onions, a leek, three or four sticks of celery, a small lump of sugar, a spoonful of mixed mustard, and a little pepper and salt. Pour two quarts of water over all, bring the liquor to the boil, skim it carefully, draw the pan to the side of the fire, and let its contents simmer gently for two hours. Wash the brains, clear them from fibre, boil them for a quarter of an hour, and beat them till smooth; put with them a slice of fresh butter, two table-spoonfuls of fine oatmeal, two table-spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup, and a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar. Stir the mixture into the soup, and let it simmer again for two hours. Skin the tongues, and cut them and the meat from the head into neat mouthfuls. Let them heat again in the soup, add a glassful of light wine, and serve. Time, four hours and a half. Probable cost, sheep's head, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
The soup is built around the brains of two sheep's heads, thickened and enriched with them. That is the part that cannot be carried over, and it is not incidental to the recipe.
- Why the brains are the problemSheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 90s established that prion disease can cross species through nervous-system tissue. Prions are not destroyed by two hours of simmering, or by any normal cooking.
- Specified risk materialUnder UK and EU rules introduced after BSE, the skull including brain, the spinal cord and the eyes of sheep and goats over twelve months (or with a permanent incisor erupted through the gum) are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. A butcher cannot lawfully supply brains from an animal of that age.
- The head itselfWhere whole heads are still sold, they are generally split and the brain and cord removed before sale. Much of this soup's richness and body comes from the beaten brains, so this is not simply a matter of substituting an ingredient.
- Bone dust and marrowSplitting a skull at home distributes bone and nervous tissue through the pot, which is precisely the contamination route the modern controls are designed to interrupt.
- If you want the dishSheep's head broths without brain are still made in several cuisines, and a current recipe from a reliable modern source should be used. Do not adapt this one.
Sheep's head broth was a staple of thrift cookery across Britain and especially Scotland, where a version made with the head, barley and root vegetables was known as powsowdie — a word generally traced to old Scots terms for the head and for a mixed mess of food. Cassell's includes it because a head was one of the cheapest things a butcher sold: the costing here, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. for enough soup for six or eight, was the whole point, and the singed heads were a common sight on late-Victorian butchers' slabs. The brains were treated as a delicacy and a thickener rather than as offal to be discarded, and beating them smooth with oatmeal to bind a broth is a technique with parallels in older liver and lights cookery. The recipe's other markers of its date are the mushroom ketchup and tarragon vinegar, both standard bottled seasonings in a nineteenth-century store cupboard, doing the work a modern cook might give to Worcestershire sauce or stock reduction.