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Bullock's Heart, with Onions
Prepare a stuffing of three ounces of bread-crumb, two ounces of onion, parboiled and finely cut, half an ounce of powdered sage, salt and pepper to taste. Fill the heart as directed in preceding recipe. It should be served with good brown gravy and apple sauce. Time to simmer, two to three hours; to roast, from three to four. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. to 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A stuffed beef heart, given in the abbreviated house style of a dictionary of cookery, which assumes you have read the entry above it. A few conversions and one adjustment of seasoning make it workable.
- The missing first step"Fill the heart as directed in preceding recipe" refers back to an entry not reproduced here. The usual Victorian preparation is to open the heart, cut away the tough divisions, valves, arteries and any clotted blood, and soak it in cold water before stuffing and tying or skewering it shut.
- A whole beef heartAn ox heart usually runs somewhere around 3 to 5 lb trimmed, though larger ones are common, which is consistent with the five or six persons given. Butchers now sell heart trimmed and often halved; two half-hearts can be sandwiched around the stuffing and tied, or the stuffing packed into the cavity of a whole one.
- Ounces to cupsThree ounces of breadcrumb is about 1.5 cups fresh crumbs or a scant cup dried. Two ounces of onion is roughly half a small onion, chopped after parboiling.
- The sageHalf an ounce of powdered sage is somewhere between four and seven tablespoons depending on how finely it is ground, a very large amount by modern measure. One to two teaspoons is closer to modern taste; more will overwhelm the meat.
- Roasting temperatureCassell's gives no oven heat. Heart is very lean and dries out fast at high heat, so a covered dish with a little stock in a moderate oven, around 325F, for the three to four hours indicated is one workable modern reading; note that covering it is closer to braising than to roasting. Long uncovered roasting at high heat will dry it badly.
- Why it takes so longHeart is dense, lean working muscle, and the long times given point to slow moist treatment. Either braise it at a bare simmer for two to three hours or roast it covered; it should be tender to a skewer, and it will still slice firm rather than falling apart.
- ServingSlice it across the grain, fairly thin, and serve with the brown gravy and apple sauce the recipe calls for.
Bullock's heart appears in Cassell's because a late-Victorian household book had to cost out every part of the animal, and offal was the economical end of the butcher's shop: the "probable cost" of 1s. 9d. to 3s. for a dish feeding six kept it within reach of a modest table. The treatment here can plausibly be read as an echo of the sage, onion and apple-sauce conventions of roast pork and goose, though the derivation is inference rather than documented borrowing.