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Calf's Pluck
Stuff the heart with a veal forcemeat to which a little bacon has been added, and fasten the liver and lights securely round it. Put it before a moderate fire, and baste it well while it is roasting. When it is cooked enough, put it on a hot dish with melted butter, which has been flavoured with a glass of port and the juice of a lemon, round it. Time to bake, from two to three hours. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for six persons.
A whole calf's pluck — heart, liver and lungs — roasted as one piece before an open fire. Sourcing is now the main obstacle, and the timing needs rethinking for the liver.
- What a pluck isThe pluck is the set of organs that come out of the chest together: heart, liver and lights (lungs), still joined by the windpipe and vessels. Butchers sold them as a unit, which is why the recipe assumes they can be tied back into a single roast.
- Lights are hard to buyLung is prohibited in food sold in the United States under USDA rules, so an American cook cannot buy it legally. In the UK and much of Europe lamb and calf lights are still sold, though usually only by order from a traditional butcher.
- Before the fire means the ovenBefore the fire means the hearth, not the oven -- the recipe assumes spit roasting and gives no temperature. If you adapt it to an oven, a moderate heat of around 350F is a workable stand-in. Set the stuffed heart on a rack over a tray so the drippings collect for basting, and turn it two or three times.
- The timing suits the heart, not the liverTwo to three hours is what a stuffed veal heart needs to become tender, but calf's liver is finished in minutes and will be grey and grainy long before that. Modern practice is to cook the heart alone and treat the liver separately.
- Basting is not optionalHeart is very lean and lung is drier still. Without frequent basting — or a bacon barding sheet tied over the top — the outside dries out well before the heart is tender.
- Veal forcemeatThe standard version is minced veal or veal suet with breadcrumbs, chopped parsley, thyme, lemon zest, mace and egg to bind. The added bacon here is for fat as much as flavour.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn Victorian cookery books melted butter means a thin white sauce of butter, flour and water or stock, not simply butter warmed in a pan. Adding a glass of port (a wineglass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz) and lemon juice to plain melted butter will split it.
- Cost and yieldTenpence a pound puts this at the modest end of the meat dishes. It serves six as written, which suggests a pluck ran to several pounds.
Pluck is an old word in the English butchery vocabulary, generally taken to refer to the parts plucked from the carcass after slaughter, and the whole set was traditionally sold cheap or given away with a larger purchase, which is why it turns up in thrift cookery from haggis to faggots to this roast. Cassell's, published for a broad middle-class readership in the later nineteenth century, catalogued such dishes alongside far grander ones because a household that kept a cook was still expected to use the whole animal. The practice of roasting a whole pluck fastened around a stuffed heart belongs to open-hearth cooking, where a spit and a dripping pan made basting easy; as closed ranges came to dominate, these organs appear more often in stews and puddings. Lung has since fallen largely out of English-speaking kitchens, kept alive mainly in Scottish haggis and in central European dishes such as Austrian Beuschel.