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Heart, Bullock's
Wash the heart in several waters, clean the blood carefully from the pipes, and put it to soak in vinegar and water for two hours or more. Drain it and fill it either with hare forcemeat or sage-and-onion stuffing. Fasten it securely, tie it in a cloth, put it into a pan of boiling water, and let it simmer gently for two hours. Take off the cloth, and roast the heart while hot, basting it plentifully with good dripping for two hours longer. Serve with good brown gravy and currant jelly, if veal forcemeat has been used, and apple jelly if the heart has been stuffed with sage and onions. The stewing may be omitted, and the heart simply roasted for three or four hours, but the flesh will not then be so tender. Probable cost of heart, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A stuffed and boiled-then-roasted beef heart, of the kind that fed a large household cheaply. The method is sound but the times belong to an era of very slow, uneven heat.
- What to buy"Bullock's heart" is simply beef heart, often around 4-5 lb whole though sizes vary a good deal, and a butcher may need notice to get one in. It arrives as a dense cone of lean muscle; trim the hard outer fat, the coarse valves and the tough interior membranes before stuffing.
- The hinge: heat, not timeHeart is dense working muscle, very lean and with almost no marbling. It either wants long moist heat until the fibres yield, or brief high heat sliced thin. Two hours simmering followed by two hours roasting is likely to leave it dry; once the simmer has it tender, the oven stage is only for colour and needs little time.
- Vinegar soakThe two-hour soak in vinegar and water draws out residual blood and mutes the strong metallic note in offal. It is still worth doing, though a couple of tablespoons of vinegar per quart of water is plenty; longer or stronger and the surface goes chalky.
- "Roast" means the oven nowThe original probably assumes a spit or a screen before an open fire, though Cassell's-era kitchens also had range ovens; either way the constant basting is specified. In a modern oven, 375-400F uncovered will brown it; baste with dripping every ten minutes or wrap loosely in caul fat or bacon, since there is no internal fat to keep it moist.
- The clothTying the stuffed heart in a cloth (the recipe does not say floured) keeps the forcemeat in and the shape intact. Muslin or cheesecloth works; failing that, sew the opening closed and tie the heart at intervals with butcher's twine.
- Forcemeat, and an inconsistencyHare forcemeat is not something most cooks will attempt; a sausagemeat, breadcrumb and herb stuffing does the same job. Note that the recipe offers hare or sage-and-onion, then refers to veal forcemeat in the serving note -- presumably the reader was expected to take any savoury meat forcemeat from elsewhere in the book.
- CarvingSlice thin and firmly across the grain. Cut with the fibres and even a well-cooked heart eats stringy.
- Cost and yield2s 6d for a joint the book reckons will feed six or seven was cheap eating by the standards of the day. The yield still holds for a 4 lb heart with stuffing.
Cassell's treats heart as one of the cheap offal cuts a Victorian butcher sold. The trick of stuffing it is old and practical: the ventricle cavities make a natural pocket, and forcemeat both stretched the meat and supplied the fat that heart itself lacks, which is also why the recipe insists on plentiful basting. The choice of currant jelly with veal forcemeat and apple jelly with sage and onion follows the period's fixed pairings, where sharp preserves were served against roasted meats much as they were with hare, venison and pork. Recipes of this kind thinned out in British cookbooks after the mid-twentieth century, when offal fell out of domestic fashion, and heart has only lately come back through nose-to-tail cooking.