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CALF'S PLUCK (another way)
Stuff the heart as in the last recipe, and bake it in a moderate oven with a little boiled vermicelli laid over it. When it is sufficiently cooked, put it on a hot dish, slice and fry the liver, lights, and a few rashers of bacon, and place them round, and pour a good brown gravy over the whole. Time to bake, two hours, or according to size. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for six persons.
A whole calf's pluck — heart, liver and lungs — dressed as one composed dish. Most of the work is in keeping the heart from drying while the soft offal is cooked at the last moment.
- Pluck and lightsA "pluck" is the set of organs pulled from the chest cavity: heart, liver and lungs, the lungs being the "lights". Lungs cannot legally be sold for human food in the United States, so the dish as written is only assemblable where a butcher can supply them, chiefly the UK and parts of Europe.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F. A calf's heart is dense muscle and wants steady heat rather than browning heat.
- The stuffed heart is the hingeTwo hours of dry baking will turn a heart to leather. Bake it covered, with a little stock or water in the dish, and only uncover at the end if you want colour. Slice it across the grain.
- "A little boiled vermicelli laid over it"Cook the vermicelli, drain it, and lay it over the heart in a loose blanket. The recipe does not say what it is for; if the heart is baked uncovered the strands will simply scorch.
- The stuffing"As in the last recipe" points back to a stuffing not printed here; forcemeats of this kind in the period are usually fresh breadcrumbs, chopped suet, parsley, thyme, grated lemon rind, salt, pepper and an egg to bind. Fill the cavities and secure with string or a skewer.
- Liver and lights, fried fastCalf's liver needs about a minute a side in hot fat and should stay pink within; anything longer makes it grainy. Slice both thin, fry the bacon first, and use its fat.
- The gravy"A good brown gravy" here is a roux-thickened brown stock, well reduced. Deglaze the baking dish and the frying pan into it, since most of the flavour is in those two pans.
- Yield and costSix servings, as stated, at the given cost of tenpence a pound.
"Pluck" is a butcher's word, generally traced to the plucking out of the chest organs in one connected mass, and it survived in English use long after the organs themselves fell out of ordinary cooking. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later nineteenth century, prints several pluck recipes. The construction is characteristic of the period's ambition on a small budget: a stuffed centrepiece, a ring of sliced fry and bacon, and a brown gravy poured over the lot, so that cheap variety meats arrive at table looking like a made dish. Lungs went out of general British and American cookery in the twentieth century — in the United States by regulation, elsewhere largely by taste — while calf's liver and heart remain butcher's staples.