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BULLOCK'S HEART (a la Mode)
Soak the heart for two hours in cold water mixed with a little vinegar; take out the arterial cartilage and the coagulated blood left in it; fill the inside with bacon cut into dice, seasoned with pepper, salt, and chopped parsley. Tie it round with tape into its original shape. Stew it in a saucepan, covered with broth, and half as much cider, if to be had; add a bunch of sweet herbs, and as many onions and carrots as there is space for. When it has simmered gently for four hours, lay it on a dish, put the carrots and onions round it; let the liquor boil a few minutes longer to thicken, then pour some of it over the heart, and serve the rest in a sauce-boat. If preferred, flavour the latter with mushroom ketchup and a little red wine, which will give to the heart the flavour of hare. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. to 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A whole beef heart braised in broth and cider — an economical Victorian joint that behaves like very lean stewing beef. Nothing here is obsolete, but a few of the assumptions are.
- The hinge: low and slow, never boilingHeart is almost pure working muscle with very little fat, and a rolling boil turns it grainy and dry. Keep the liquid at a bare shiver for the full four hours, either on the lowest burner setting or in a 300F oven with the lid on.
- Buying itA bullock's heart is a beef heart, usually around 3-5 lb; most supermarkets will not stock it, but a butcher will order one. Veal or lamb hearts are smaller and will be tender in considerably less time.
- Trimming"Arterial cartilage and the coagulated blood" means the tough white valve tissue and the hard tubes at the top, plus any clotted blood in the chambers. Cut them out with a small sharp knife and rinse the cavities; the vinegar soak is for the same purpose and an hour in salted water does as well.
- TapeVictorian recipes routinely specify cotton tape rather than string; broad tape is less likely than twine to cut into the meat. Butcher's twine at 1-inch intervals is the modern equivalent — tie it firmly, since the stuffing will try to escape.
- Liquid quantities"Covered with broth, and half as much cider" reads most simply as cider to half the volume of the broth, giving roughly two parts stock to one of cider, enough to submerge the heart. In an English book of this date cider means dry fermented cider, not the sweet unfermented American drink.
- ThickeningA few minutes of boiling will only reduce the liquor slightly, not thicken it in any modern sense. Strain it, boil hard to reduce by a third, and finish with a beurre manié if you want a sauce that coats.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain and worth seeking out; a mixture of soy sauce and a little Worcestershire approximates the savour. The "flavour of hare" it suggests is the gamey depth Victorians prized in dark meat.
- ServingRest the heart ten minutes, cut the twine, and slice across the grain — sliced with the grain it is stringy. Five or six servings, as the original says, though the yield depends entirely on the size of the heart.
Offal cookery of this kind was the backbone of thrifty Victorian catering, and the price is given plainly — 1s. 9d. to 3s. for a dish feeding five or six, a fraction of the cost of a joint of beef. "A la mode" in nineteenth-century English kitchens meant a large piece of meat larded or stuffed with seasoned bacon, tied, and braised slowly with root vegetables and herbs, the same treatment given to boeuf a la mode; the phrase survives in American "pot roast" traditions. The suggestion that mushroom ketchup and red wine will lend "the flavour of hare" is telling: game was the prestige meat, and a good deal of Victorian sauce-making was aimed at coaxing cheap dark meat toward it. Beef heart is generally said to have faded from British and American home cooking after the Second World War, though it never left Peru, where anticuchos de corazón are still eaten, and it has returned in recent years on the strength of nose-to-tail cooking.