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.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sheep's Head, Stuffed and Roasted
Sheep's Head, Stuffed and Roasted
Instead of skinning the head, scald and scrape it till the wool is removed, then split it in halves. Take out the brains whole and the tongue. Cleanse the former from fibre, wash the latter well, and place both in a saucepan. Cover them with cold water mixed with a large spoonful of vinegar, and simmer gently for twenty minutes. Take the head, remove the eyes, cut away the gristle from the nose, shorten the jawbones where there is no flesh, then soak it in lukewarm water. Make a little good veal forcemeat, and add to it an onion finely shredded, and the tongue and brains minced. Bind the forcemeat together with yolk of egg, put it into the head, fasten the two halves securely with string, and roast before a clear fire. Baste liberally, and send to table with it brown sauce and red currant jelly. Time to roast, two hours. Probable cost, sheep's head, 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. Sufficient for three persons.
This is a butcher's-shop dish from an era when a whole sheep's head was among the cheapest things a cook could buy. It cannot be reproduced today, and the reasons are worth setting out plainly.
- The brains are the problemSheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy of the same family as BSE. The infectious agent concentrates in brain, spinal cord and other nervous tissue, and it is not destroyed by simmering, roasting, or any temperature reachable in a domestic kitchen.
- Regulation has caught upIn the UK and EU, specified risk material from sheep and goats over twelve months of age — skull including brain and eyes, tonsils, spinal cord — must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. A whole undressed head with the brains in place is not something a licensed butcher will normally supply.
- The tongue is not the issueSheep's tongue is still eaten, and split heads are still sold in some markets with the risk material removed. It is the brain, the eyes and the intact skull that put this particular version out of reach, not the animal or the cut in principle.
- No corrected version hereThere is no adjusted time or temperature that makes this preparation safe, so none is offered. Anyone wanting stuffed sheep's head should work from a current recipe using a properly dressed head from a licensed supplier.
- "Before a clear fire"The original means spit-roasting in front of an open fire that has burned down to a steady glow with no smoke or flame, the meat turning and dripping into a pan. Two hours is a plausible time for that method with constant basting; it has no direct oven equivalent.
- What the price tells you1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. — fourteen to eighteen pence in pre-decimal money — fed three people. Against a labourer's weekly wage of perhaps twenty shillings, this was a Sunday dinner for a household with very little money.
- Veal forcemeatVeal forcemeats of this period were typically minced veal or veal suet with breadcrumbs, herbs, lemon peel and egg yolk to bind. Veal is far less commonly kept by modern cooks, and pork or chicken mixtures are more usual in comparable stuffings today.
Sheep's head appears in Cassell's most likely because a Victorian cookery dictionary was expected to account for every saleable part of every common animal, and the head was among the cheapest. In Scotland it was more usually made into powsowdie, or sheep's-head broth, the singed head simmered for hours with barley and vegetables; one English treatment, as here, was to stuff and roast it and serve it dressed up with brown sauce and red currant jelly, the same accompaniments given to a joint of mutton, though English books of the period also give the head boiled and as broth. The instruction to scald and scrape rather than skin points to a head bought straight from the slaughterhouse with the fleece still on, a domestic reality that vanished with the rise of the prepared-meat trade. Dishes of this kind fell away in Britain through the twentieth century for reasons of taste well before regulation removed them, but it was the BSE crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and the controls on specified risk material that followed, that ended them for good.