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Calf's Heart, Roasted
Wash the heart thoroughly in several waters, then leave it to soak for half an hour. Wipe it drv. and fill it with good veal stuffing, tie a piece of oiled paper round it, and roast it before a good fire an hour and a half or more, according to the size. Before serving, take off the paper, sprinkle some flour over it, and baste it well. Send it to table with plenty of good brown gravy, and some fried bacon on a separate dish.
A working-class cut treated as a roast. The method assumes a spit before an open fire; the main translation work is oven position, wrapping and doneness.
- The hinge: don't overcook itHeart is dense, lean muscle with almost no fat or connective tissue to melt. It is either cooked briefly and served pink, or braised for hours until it surrenders — an hour and a half of roasting puts a calf's heart squarely in the dry middle ground. Roast at 350F and start checking the centre at 45-60 minutes for a 1-1.5 lb calf's heart. Note that a stuffed heart cannot be served pink: the egg-bound forcemeat in the cavity has to be cooked through, so either cook the whole thing to a safe centre temperature or bake the stuffing separately and pull the heart itself at 135-140F and rest it.
- The soaking is not optionalHeart chambers hold clotted blood, which turns bitter and metallic when cooked. Split the top of the heart, cut out the valves, tough white sinew and any tubes, then soak in several changes of cold water until it runs clear. The half hour given here is a minimum.
- "Veal stuffing"No recipe is given here; the usual Victorian veal forcemeat is fresh breadcrumbs, shredded suet, chopped parsley, lemon zest, thyme, mace or nutmeg, salt and pepper, bound with egg, though proportions vary from book to book. Butter substitutes for suet. You need only a few ounces — the cavity is small once trimmed.
- Oiled paperGreased parchment tied on with kitchen string, or a loose foil tent. It shields the exterior from the fire's radiant heat while the stuffed centre catches up. In an oven, remove it for the last 15 minutes.
- "Before a good fire"Spit-roasting in front of the hearth, with a dripping pan beneath. An oven at 350F is the nearest equivalent; put the heart on a rack over a tray and baste with the drippings or with melted butter.
- Flouring and basting at the endThis is dredging to froth — a light dusting of flour, then hot fat spooned over, which sets into a thin crisp browned skin. Done under a hot grill for a minute or two it works as well as it did on a spit.
- The brown gravyNo gravy recipe is given on this page. Deglaze the roasting tray with a splash of stock and a little red wine or port, thicken lightly, and season sharply — heart takes well to acidity or a sweet-sour note against it.
- YieldOne calf's heart serves two, perhaps three with the bacon and plenty of potatoes. Slice it thinly across the grain, not in thick chunks.
Heart sat among the cheapest offal, and in Victorian Britain it was a cut associated with households that could not afford a joint. Cassell's, aimed at the middle-class rather than the grand kitchen, treats it seriously and gives it the full roasting apparatus: stuffing, oiled paper, dredged crust, brown gravy and a side dish of bacon. Stuff a heart, roast it before the fire and carve it in slices and it eats, at a glance, like a small joint of meat, which is exactly the transformation the household economist wanted. Calf's heart, being smaller and milder than bullock's, was the one usually called for in a roast like this, and the accompanying bacon does the same job as the suet in the forcemeat — supplying fat to a cut that has almost none of its own. Dredging a roast with flour and hot fat at the last moment to raise a froth was standard English practice through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.