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 › CHAPTER XXXVI › CHAPTER XXXVI: Scotch
CHAPTER XXXVI: Scotch
Sheep's-Head Broth (Scotch recipe).
Take a cupful of barley, sheep's head and trotters, and, if the broth should be wanted stronger, a neck of mutton; put them into a pot with 2 quarts cold water; as soon as it comes to the boil, skim it well. Chop 2 carrots and 2 turnips small, a sprig of parsley and 2 onions; before you add the roots, skim it again. Boil slowly till the head is tender; take the pot off the fire and stand it near, covered closely, for a quarter of an hour before serving. The head and trotters should be served separately with whole carrots and turnips.
To Prepare the Head and Trotters.
They should be well singed, which is best done at the blacksmith's.
Split the head down the middle of the skull; take out the brains, lay the head and trotters to soak in water all night, scrape and wash well before using. Sheep's head is excellent eaten cold.
This is a genuine Scots broth, and the barley-and-root part of it is unremarkable. The problem is the head itself, and it is not a problem that can be cooked away.
- Why the skull is the issueThe instruction to split the head down the middle of the skull and take out the brains is the step that rules this recipe out. Sawing through a skull disperses brain and spinal-cord tissue over the meat, the board, the knife and the pot, and no amount of boiling inactivates a prion. Discarding the brains afterwards does not undo that contamination.
- Transmissible spongiform encephalopathiesSheep carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. It has not been shown to infect humans, but BSE-era controls treated older sheep's central nervous tissue as a precautionary risk, and prions in general cannot be made safe by heat, salt, acid or long soaking. This is a different class of hazard from bacterial risk, where temperature is the answer.
- It is regulated, not merely unfashionableIn the United Kingdom and the European Union the skull, brain and spinal cord of sheep and goats over twelve months old are classed as specified risk material and must be removed and destroyed rather than sold for food. That is one reason split heads are now hard to come by, and part of why this recipe reads as unfamiliar rather than merely old-fashioned.
- The blacksmith's forgeThe recipe's own direction that the singeing is 'best done at the blacksmith's' dates it as much as anything in it, and there is no domestic equivalent worth pursuing here.
- Trotters are a separate matterFeet are not nervous-system tissue and remain a legitimate ingredient, sold cleaned and split. If the collagen-rich, faintly sticky broth is what appeals, a current recipe using trotters or shanks and neck of mutton will give it without the head.
- If you want the brothBarley, mutton neck, carrot, turnip, onion and parsley in that proportion is Scotch broth, and it is still made. Use a modern recipe for it rather than adapting this one.
Sheep's-head broth was for centuries one of the cheapest substantial dinners in Scotland, and it survived in print long after it had left most tables because it was so closely tied to national character: the singed head, the barley, the whole carrots and turnips served alongside. Edinburgh had a particular reputation for it, and the dish sometimes appears under the old name powsowdie, generally traced to a Scots word for the head or crown. Its appeal was economic before it was sentimental. The head and feet were the parts of the animal nobody paid much for, and slow boiling turned them into gelatinous stock, a plate of tender meat and cold leftovers for the next day, which is why a book of household economies such as this one records it at all. Regulation later played its part too: from the 1980s and 1990s onward, spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and its long-known counterpart in sheep pushed skulls and spinal tissue out of the food chain, and a whole family of head-and-brain dishes went with them.