Skip to main content
Main

Sheep’s Head Broth

A hearty broth made by simmering a sheep's head with root vegetables, herbs, and oatmeal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sheep’s Head Broth

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sheep's head thoroughly and soak it in warm water for 2 hours to remove blood.

  2. Place the head in a saucepan and cover it completely with cold water.

Make the broth

  1. Bring the water to a boil, then add the chopped carrots, turnips, onions, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  2. Mix the Scotch oatmeal with a little stock from the pan until smooth, then stir it into the broth. Keep stirring until the broth boils.

  3. Reduce heat and simmer for 1.5 to 2 hours with the lid tightly fastened.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sheep's head
Provides the meat and bones that give the broth its body and rich flavour.
Scotch oatmeal
Starch that thickens the broth as it heats and gives it a fuller texture.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aromatic flavour to the broth.
Turnips
Add mild, earthy flavour and body as they soften during simmering.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma to the broth as they cook down.

The step that matters

Stirring the oatmeal into the broth. Oatmeal mixed in as a lump or added without being smoothed first will clump and stay grainy. Stirring until smooth, then keeping the broth moving until it boils, lets the starch disperse and thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, parsley, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes