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Harslet, Pig's
Wash the heart, lights, liver, and sweetbread in lukewarm water, and boil them gently for half an hour. Take them out, drain them, cut them into neat slices, season with a little pepper and salt, and dredge some flour over them. Fry them in a little hot dripping or lard, and with them half a pound of streaky bacon, also sliced. Garnish with fried parsley. Mix a tea-spoonful of made mustard with half a tea-spoonful of salt and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper. Stir this into three table-spoonfuls of boiling gravy, add three table-spoonfuls of claret, and serve the sauce in a tureen. If preferred, the harslet may be stewed with half a pint of gravy and a sliced onion. Time, ten minutes to fry the meat. Probable cost, 8d. or 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A pluck fry: the whole set of organs from one pig, parboiled, sliced, floured and crisped in fat, with a sharp mustard-and-claret sauce alongside. Most of the work is in sourcing rather than cooking.
- What "harslet" isAlso spelled haslet or harslet, it means the edible offal of a pig taken together — heart, lungs, liver, and in this case sweetbread (thymus or pancreas). A butcher will call the same bundle the pluck.
- Lights are lungs"Lights" is the old word for lungs. In the United States lung is not permitted in food sold commercially, so the dish cannot be assembled as written from a US butcher; in the UK and much of Europe pig's lights are still obtainable on order. Substituting extra heart and liver keeps the proportions sensible.
- Don't overcook the liverThe thirty-minute gentle boil suits heart and lights, which are dense working muscle, but liver goes grey and grainy long before that. Add the liver only for the last few minutes of the simmer, or skip its boil entirely and fry the slices straight from raw for two minutes a side.
- Dripping and lardBoth are still sold and both are correct here; beef dripping gives the more savoury crust. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point will do the job, though not olive oil at frying heat.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard means prepared mustard from a jar, as opposed to dry mustard flour. Use a plain sharp English mustard, not a sweetened or grainy one — the seasoning is meant to cut through organ meat.
- ClaretClaret is the British term for dry red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works. Three tablespoons into three tablespoons of boiling gravy makes a very small, very concentrated sauce; scale it up if you want more than a spoonful each.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of gravy for the stewed version is 10 fl oz in imperial measure, roughly 1¼ US cups. Half a pound of streaky bacon is about 225 g of what an American shop sells simply as bacon.
- Fried parsleySprigs of parsley, dried thoroughly, dropped into the hot frying fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing. Wet parsley will spit violently in the pan.
- YieldThe book's three or four persons is honest for a supper dish, though it assumes bread or potatoes alongside. The 8d. or 10d. cost reflects offal's status as the cheapest meat on the block.
Harslet belongs to the economy of the household pig, where nothing was thrown away and the perishable organs had to be eaten within a day or two of slaughter, long before the hams and bacon were ready. The word descends through Middle English from Old French hastelet, a small piece of meat roasted on a spit, and in time it came to be associated with the pluck. Cassell's places it among plain family cookery and prices it at eight or ten pence, which marks it as a dish for the kitchen table rather than the dining room. Regional versions survive in Britain as a baked or potted loaf is still sold sliced cold — which is a different treatment of the same thrift.