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Lamb's Head to Fricassee
Parboil the head and haslet (the liver excepted); cut the meat in slices from the head; slice the heart, tongue, etc., and fricassee as for chicken. Have the liver fried in slices with the sweetbreads and slices of bacon and bunches of parsley. Pour the fricassee into the dish, and garnish with the fried pieces.--Mrs. R.
This is a two-pan dish: the head meats are gently stewed in a white fricassee sauce, and the liver, sweetbreads and bacon are fried separately and laid over the top at the last moment. The instructions assume you already know how to fricassee a chicken, which in this book means a butter-and-flour sauce built on the cooking liquid, often finished with cream or egg yolk.
- HasletAn old term for the pluck — the heart, liver and lungs, and often the windpipe, sold together as one unit. Ask a halal or ethnic butcher for a lamb's head and pluck; most supermarkets carry neither. Sheep lung cannot legally be sold for food in the United States, so a US cook is likely working with head, heart, tongue and liver only.
- Ordering the headHave the butcher split it lengthwise and remove the eyes and brain; the tongue is usually left in. Soak the split head in several changes of cold salted water for a few hours to draw out blood before parboiling, or the sauce will turn grey.
- Parboil means most of the cookingSimmer the head and heart in salted water with an onion and a bay leaf for 2 to 2½ hours, until the cheek meat pulls away easily and the tongue skin peels off. The tongue must be skinned while hot. Keep the liquid — reduced, it is the base for the fricassee sauce.
- Why the liver is exceptedLiver toughens and goes grainy in a long simmer, and it clouds the stock. It goes in raw and is fried at the end, in slices no thicker than half an inch, two or three minutes a side, cooked through.
- SweetbreadsNot from the head — these are the thymus or pancreas, bought separately. Soak in cold water an hour, blanch two minutes, cool, peel off the membrane and press under a weight before slicing and frying. Unpeeled sweetbreads fry into rubber.
- The fricassee itselfWhite, not browned: cook 3 tablespoons butter with 3 tablespoons flour without colouring, whisk in about 2½ cups of the strained cooking liquid, season, add the sliced meats and heat through only. If you finish with egg yolk and cream, take the pan off the heat first or it will curdle.
- AssemblyFry the bacon, then the liver and sweetbreads in the bacon fat, and drop the parsley bunches into the hot fat for a few seconds until crisp and dark green. Sauce into a warm dish, fried pieces arranged on top, served at once — the point is the contrast between soft stewed meat and crisp fried.
- YieldOne lamb's head with its heart, tongue and liver will feed about four.
Head and pluck dishes were a mainstay of nineteenth-century meat cookery: an animal was butchered whole, and the parts that would not keep were cooked first and close to home. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives — hence the "Mrs. R." — records dozens of these thrift dishes alongside the more famous cakes and hams. The word fricassee comes from French and by this period meant, in American books, a pale stew of cut-up meat in its own thickened broth, as distinguished from a browned ragout; the phrase "as for chicken" is a cross-reference to the chicken fricassee any reader of the book was expected to know by heart. Haslet (sometimes harslet) is much older, and survives in Britain today mainly as the name of a Lincolnshire pork loaf. The habit of frying the liver and sweetbreads separately for garnish is a genteel touch: it turns a dish of offal into something that could be sent to table looking composed.