Home › Recipes › Calves' Hearts
Calves' Hearts
If the hearts are being used, cut them in half inch slices, crosswise. If liver is chosen, it should be sliced thin, then scalded, and after standing for five minutes in the scalding water, the outer membranes should be pulled off and the tough veins removed. Then dust the meat with salt and pepper. In the meantime, melt sufficient Snowdrift in a frying-pan to barely cover the bottom, and for each pound of meat, slice into this six peeled onions and add a sliced green pepper, from which the seeds have been removed. Add a few grains of sugar and a little salt and pepper, and fry the vegetables together gently until they are done. Then remove them from the Snowdrift and quickly fry the meat in it. Then put the meat on a platter, cover it with the fried vegetables, and serve very hot. If desired, this may be accompanied by Tomato Sauce.
A skillet dish built around organ meat and a great many onions, written to sell a brand of shortening. Two things decide the outcome: how well the heart is trimmed, and how briefly it meets the pan.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening; the book exists to promote it. Use butter, lard or a neutral oil; you want a thin film, just enough to cover the pan bottom.
- Trimming the heartA calf's heart must be split, rinsed of clotted blood, and the valves, thick vessels and any hard white gristle cut away before slicing. What remains is dense muscle; cut the half-inch slices across the grain as directed or it eats tough.
- Skip the liver scaldScalding and standing five minutes was the old way to loosen the membrane, and it partly cooks and grays the surface. Modern practice is to peel the membrane from cold liver with a small knife and pat it dry; wet liver will not brown.
- Six onions is not an errorSix peeled onions per pound of meat is the point of the dish, closer to a smothered onion garnish than a seasoning. Expect perhaps 15 to 25 minutes over moderate heat for them to go soft and sweet, with the pinch of sugar helping them color.
- "Quickly fry the meat"This is the hinge. Heart slices want a hot pan and roughly 2 to 3 minutes a side, served slightly pink; liver wants even less. Both turn dry and livery-bitter within a minute of overcooking, which is why the vegetables come out of the pan first.
- SeasoningSalt the meat just before it goes into the fat rather than well ahead, so the surface stays dry enough to sear.
- YieldA pound of heart or liver with its onions serves two or three, and it does not reheat well. Serve very hot, as the recipe insists, since organ meat chills fast.
A New Snowdrift Cook Book belongs to the era of the manufacturer's cookbook, in which a fat or a flour company hired a domestic-science writer to demonstrate its product across an entire household repertoire; Snowdrift was a cottonseed shortening, and the recipes in the book contrive again and again to call for it. That a book of this kind includes calves' hearts says something about American cooking before the middle of the twentieth century: heart, liver, kidney and tongue were cheap, common and unremarkable, sold by every butcher and cooked without apology. The treatment here, with its heavy blanket of onions and green pepper and a tomato sauce alongside, follows what was long a familiar way of handling strong-flavored meat, and it lines up closely with the older Creole and Southern habit of smothering. Offal fell out of general American use over the middle of the twentieth century, which is why a recipe that once needed no introduction now reads as adventurous.