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Stuffed Hearts with Vegetables
Clean and wash three calves' hearts; stuff and skewer into shape. Draw small strips of salt pork (lardoons) through edges of hearts. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour and brown well in hot Cottolene, with two slices onion, four slices carrot, one blade celery cut fine, two sprays parsley, two small bits bay leaf, three cloves and one-half teaspoon peppercorns. When hearts are richly browned, remove to Dutch oven, casserole or deep baking dish. Add two cups Brown Stock, cover closely and cook slowly in the oven until tender (about two hours), basting six times while cooking. Cut three slices of stale bread one-third inch thick, shape with large round cutter; with a small cutter remove centers to form rings: brush with melted butter and brown delicately in the oven. Arrange them on hot serving platter, set a heart in each ring and surround with new carrots and turnips cut Julienne style and cooked in boiling salted water until tender. There should be one and onehalf cups each. Drain and dress with Maître d'Hôtel Butter.
A straightforward braise dressed up for company. The hinge is heat: heart is dense working muscle, and it needs a long, low, moist cook to turn tender rather than the hard grey it becomes over direct heat.
- CottoleneA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening (cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, not a hydrogenated fat) promoted heavily around 1900, and the reason this book exists in the form it does. Use lard, beef drippings or a neutral high-smoke-point oil for the browning.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures; "cook slowly" is usually read as something in the region of 300-325F. The liquid should barely tremble rather than come to a full simmer.
- "Casserole" and "Dutch oven"Both mean a heavy lidded pot for the stove and oven, not a shallow baking dish. Any braiser with a tight lid works; two cups of stock is only a partial submersion, so the seal matters.
- The stuffingThe recipe assumes you know it; a plain bread stuffing is presumably meant. Pack it loosely; heart contracts as it cooks.
- LardoonsThin strips of salt pork threaded through the meat with a larding needle. A boning knife and patience will do it. Salt pork is salty, so go easy on the added salt.
- Sourcing the heartsCalves' hearts run roughly a pound each and will probably need to be ordered from a butcher. Trim away the tough valve tissue, arteries and any interior fat, and rinse the chambers thoroughly. Beef heart can be substituted, but it is much larger and will not take the recipe's stuffed, one-heart-per-ring presentation.
- Brown StockA dark veal or beef stock made from roasted bones. Unsalted commercial stock, reduced a little, is fine; salted supermarket broth will concentrate too far over two hours.
- Maître d'Hôtel ButterSoftened butter beaten with lemon juice, chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Add it to the drained carrots and turnips off the heat so it stays creamy.
- YieldThe recipe sets one heart in each of three crouton rings, so it plates three as written, or six if the hearts are sliced. The braising liquid could be strained and served as sauce; the book does not say so.
52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company to sell Cottolene, its cottonseed-oil shortening, which explains why the fat is named by brand rather than generically. The menus themselves are conventional turn-of-the-century American company cooking, and this one is a good example of how offal was handled in a household with ambitions: heart was among the cheapest cuts on the board, so it was larded, stuffed, braised in brown stock and then set on toasted croutons with julienned new vegetables so that nothing about the plate announced its economy. The croûte or crouton ring is a French service device, borrowed along with the lardoons, the mirepoix of onion, carrot and celery, and the maître d'hôtel butter; American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s leaned on that vocabulary constantly to give plain ingredients standing. Heart largely fell out of the mainstream American diet after mid-century, which is why the recipe now reads as adventurous rather than thrifty.