Home › The Principles of Cookery › Bullock's Heart, to Roast
Bullock's Heart, to Roast
Soak the heart as before, fill all the openings at the top, or broad end, with a stuffing composed of crumb of bread, chopped suet, parsley, pepper, and salt, moistened with an egg and a little milk; suspend with the pointed end downwards. Baste liberally. The heart will have to be roasted from three to four hours, according to the size; it should be well done. Send to table with beef gravy. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. to 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A whole beef heart is lean, dense muscle rather than a tender roasting joint, and almost everything that decides whether this dish is good or leathery happens before it reaches the oven. The instructions assume a spit or a roasting jack in front of an open fire, which changes how you have to read the timings.
- "Soak the heart as before"The direction points back to an earlier entry; in this book that generally means soaking in cold water for an hour or two to draw out the blood held in the chambers. Before that, split down to the ventricles, cut away the hard white valves, the tubes at the top and any surface fat and clotted blood; a whole beef heart commonly runs somewhere around 3 to 5 lb and is largely hollow once cleaned.
- Suspended, not on a rack"Suspend with the pointed end downwards" describes a dangling spit or bottle jack turning before the fire, with a dripping pan beneath. In an oven, stand it upright in a deep pan, broad stuffed end up, so the stuffing stays in and the juices collect rather than run out.
- Oven settingThe book gives no oven temperatures. If you are adapting spit-roasting to an oven, a moderate heat of around 325-350F is a reasonable working equivalent. Cover the pan loosely for the bulk of the time and uncover for the last half hour to colour the outside.
- The timing is the hingeThree to four hours is long even for a large heart, and "it should be well done" is the opposite of current practice. Heart is very lean and close-grained, and roasted dry for that long it tends to dry out and turn rubbery. Modern cooks either sear slices hot and fast and serve them pink, or braise the whole thing in liquid until tender. If you roast it whole, take it to about 145-150F at the centre, which for a 4-5 lb heart is nearer 1 1/2 to 2 hours, and rest it before carving in thin slices across the grain.
- Basting matters more than usual"Baste liberally" is not optional here. There is very little fat in the meat to keep it moist, so bard the outside with sliced fat bacon or beef suet, or baste with dripping every 15 minutes.
- The stuffingFor one heart, figure roughly 2 cups fresh breadcrumbs, 4 oz shredded beef suet (butter works, though it melts out sooner), a good handful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper, bound with one egg and just enough milk to make it hold together. Pack it into the cleaned chambers and tie or skewer the opening shut.
- Beef gravyThe period sense is a clear, well-flavoured beef stock reduced and lightly thickened, not a pan sauce -- the drippings from a lean heart give very little. Make it separately and deglaze the roasting pan into it.
- Cost and yield1s. 9d. to 3s. reflects heart as one of the cheapest butcher's items of the day, and it remains inexpensive. Five or six portions is realistic for a whole heart with the stuffing.
Cassell's treats offal as a matter of course, and heart sat at the bottom end of the butcher's stall alongside lights, melt and cheek -- meat for households counting pence, which is why the entry bothers to quote a price as low as 1s. 9d. Stuffing and roasting a heart whole is often said to have been the usual way of dressing it in nineteenth-century British cookery, since the hollow chambers make a natural case for a forcemeat and the stuffing supplies the richness the meat itself lacks; the same treatment appears for sheep's and pig's hearts, scaled down. The direction to hang it point downwards belongs to the era of the bottle jack, a spring-driven clockwork device that slowly rotated a joint before an open fire. Heart largely vanished from British and American tables in the twentieth century, though it never left the cooking of the Andes, where beef heart grilled on skewers as anticuchos is street food, or of eastern Europe and southeast Asia.