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Lamb's Head
Clean the head and put in a pot with the liver. Cover with water, add a teaspoon of salt, and let boil until tender. Take up the head, split it through the bone, cut the meat across both ways, put in a dripping pan, spread with grated bread crumbs seasoned with salt, pepper, nutmeg and sweet herbs. Set in the oven, baste every few minutes with melted butter. Chop the liver and tongue, put in a saucepan with half a teacup of the water in which the head was boiled, set over the fire, thicken with a teaspoon of butter rolled in flour, season with salt and pepper; let come to a boil. Take the head up on a heated dish, pour the liver and tongue around it, garnish with slices of lemon, and serve.
A whole boiled-then-browned lamb's head, served with a quick gravy of its own liver and tongue. Nothing in the method is difficult; the work is all in sourcing and in the initial cleaning, neither of which the original bothers to describe.
- SourcingA whole lamb's head is a special order from a halal or Greek butcher, or from a farm that sells direct. Ask for it split lengthwise, skinned, with the eyes removed and the brain taken out, which saves the awkward part of the job. Note that in the UK and EU the skull and brain of sheep over twelve months are classed as specified risk material and are removed at slaughter, so a head from an older animal will arrive without them.
- Cleaning"Clean the head" means scrubbing the ears and nostrils under running water, checking the teeth and gums for grass and grit, and soaking the head in cold salted water for an hour or two to draw out blood. Any remaining hair is singed off or scraped with a knife.
- Boiling time"Until tender" is 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer for the head — the cheek and jaw meat should give under a fork. The liver does not need this long; lift it out after 20 to 25 minutes or it will turn grainy and dry.
- The tongueThe recipe assumes you know to peel it. The tough outer skin slips off easily while the tongue is still hot; leave it a few minutes and it will not come away cleanly.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is usual in books of this date. Use 375F: hot enough to set and colour the crumb coating in 20 to 25 minutes, not hot enough to dry meat that is already fully cooked. Basting with melted butter every few minutes also keeps the crust from scorching.
- TeacupA period teacup is variously reckoned at 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacup is roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces of the cooking liquor. Skim the fat off it first.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié — equal parts softened butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the simmering liquid off the boil, then brought back to a boil for a minute to cook out the raw flour taste. A teaspoon of butter thickens only a small quantity of sauce; scale up if you have more liquor.
- Sweet herbsIn nineteenth-century books the term usually covered some combination of thyme, marjoram, savory and parsley. Dried, a teaspoon total in the crumbs is enough alongside the nutmeg.
- YieldOne head gives modest but rich portions for two, or four as part of a larger meal. Serve the cheeks, tongue and jaw meat; the lemon does as much to cut the fat as to decorate.
Head dishes belong to a period when a butcher's cheapest cuts still had a settled place on a middle-class table. The method here is a standard English treatment — boil to tenderness, then crumb and brown in the oven with butter, a technique also applied to calf's head and pig's cheek — and the accompanying sauce of chopped liver and tongue in thickened cooking liquor follows the same thrift, using the offal that came attached rather than buying anything more. Lamb's or sheep's head soups and stews survive in Scotland, Scandinavia, the Balkans and Mexico, but in Anglo-American home cooking the dish fell away in the twentieth century as offal lost status, and in Britain and the EU the BSE controls of the 1990s moved sheep skulls out of the retail trade altogether. The lemon garnish is a period touch: acid and nutmeg were conventional accompaniments to a dish that was frankly gelatinous and fatty.