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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To Stew Lamb's Head
423. Boil the head three-quarters of an hour, the liver a quarter of an hour, and the lights an hour, or rather more. Rub the head with the yolk of an egg; add some parsley, lemon-peel, a very small quantity of thyme, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and some bread-crumb. Grill it, make brain-cakes the same as for calf's head or forcemeat, and serve in some very rich gravy; and, if it is not thick enough, add a little flour and butter just before taking it off the fire.
This is a whole-carcass thrift dish of the mid-nineteenth century, and two of its components — the brain and the lungs — are no longer sold or eaten in most of the English-speaking world. The notes below explain the terms and the reasons the dish is off the table rather than how to attempt it.
- Brain and skull are specified risk materialThe brain-cakes are made from the brain taken from the split skull. Sheep and goats carry scrapie, a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, and since the BSE era the skull, brain, spinal cord and related nervous tissue of older sheep have been classed as specified risk material and excluded from the food chain in the UK and EU. No cooking method inactivates a prion; boiling and grilling do nothing to it.
- "Lights" means lungsLights are the lungs, boiled here for an hour or more. Lung is prohibited for human food in the United States under USDA rules, and it is not generally sold in British butchers' shops today either. Any modernisation of the dish would have to drop this element entirely.
- The head itselfThe recipe begins with the head already ready for the pot; it gives no instructions for splitting, cleaning or soaking it, which implies that work was done by the butcher. That trade service has essentially disappeared, and heads from older sheep fall under the skull restrictions.
- What the method actually wasThe head is boiled, then coated with egg yolk and a herbed crumb of parsley, lemon peel, thyme, pepper, salt and nutmeg, and browned — "grill" in this period means overhead heat, not a barbecue. The liver and lights are boiled to their own separate timings, but the recipe does not say what is then done with them; the brain-cakes are made by cross-reference to the calf's head recipe.
- "Brain-cakes the same as for calf's head"The book expects you to look up its calf's head recipe for the fuller instructions. Calf brain is not a safe substitute; bovine skull and brain are specified risk material in older cattle, and the tissue is the one BSE is carried in.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" at the end is the ancestor of beurre mani\together to a paste and whisked into simmering liquid; the recipe gives no proportions.
- If you want the dishA current recipe using shoulder or neck of lamb will give the same rich, gelatinous stew without any restricted tissue. Follow one of those rather than adapting this.
Sheep's and lamb's heads were among the cheapest meat a nineteenth-century household could buy, and cookery books of the period treat them as a matter of course: Scotland had powsowdie and sheep's head broth, and singed heads were sold ready-scorched in Edinburgh markets well into the twentieth century. The elaboration here \browbrowned, garnished with fried brain-cakes and served in "very rich gravy" \ shows the familiar Victorian move of dressing a poor cut in the manner of an expensive one, the same treatment given to calf's head in the grander kitchens. The instruction to cook head, liver and lights for three different lengths of time reflects a period when the parts of the animal arrived together and nothing was thrown away. That completeness is precisely what modern regulation has broken up: the parts of the animal this recipe depends on most are now the parts kept furthest from the kitchen.