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HEART, CALF'S (another way)
Wash and soak the heart, cut it into slices about a quarter of an inch thick, and fry these in a little hot dripping or butter. About five minutes before they are done put a slice of bacon into the pan for each slice of heart, and when they are sufficiently cooked serve on a hot dish, and cover each piece of heart with a slice of bacon. Boil two or three table-spoonfuls of thin flour and water in the pan in which the meat was fried. Season it with pepper and salt, add one table-spoonful of red currant jelly, and serve as hot as possible. Time, fifteen minutes to fry the slices of heart. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward pan-fry of offal that rewards a light hand: heart is dense, very lean muscle, and the fifteen minutes the original allows will take quarter-inch slices well past their best.
- Buy and trimA calf's heart runs roughly 1 to 1.5 lb, against 3 to 5 lb for beef. Order it from a butcher; before slicing, cut away the tough outer membrane, the pale fibrous valves and any interior clots.
- The soakWash under cold running water and soak 1 to 2 hours in cold salted water, changing it once, to draw out residual blood. Pat thoroughly dry or the slices will steam rather than brown.
- Cut across the grainHeart is directional muscle. Slice against the fibres at a quarter inch, as directed, and the pieces stay tender; cut along them and they turn stringy no matter how briefly they cook.
- TimingFifteen minutes is too long. Over high heat, quarter-inch slices need about 1 to 2 minutes a side, coming out rosy in the middle like a minute steak. Heart has almost no fat to keep it forgiving once past medium.
- DrippingDripping is the first fat the recipe names, though it allows butter as well, and any high-smoke-point fat works. Butter alone will brown before the pan is hot enough for a proper crust.
- BaconMuch period bacon was dry-cured and saltier and drier than modern streaky, though milder wet cures were also on sale by this date. Give it more time than the five minutes suggested if it is thick-cut, or crisp it first and keep it warm while the heart fries.
- The gravy"Thin flour and water" means a thin slurry, not a paste; and the two or three tablespoonfuls are of that mixture, not of dry flour. Whisk a little flour into cold water or stock, pour it into the hot pan and boil a minute or two so the raw flour taste cooks out. Stock instead of water is a plain improvement.
- Redcurrant jellyOne tablespoon is a seasoning, not a glaze. It sharpens and rounds an otherwise flat pan gravy; sour cherry or cranberry jelly does the same job.
- Yield and costFive or six portions from a single calf's heart makes for small servings by current habits; count on three or four. The 3s. is late-Victorian shillings and has no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's gives calf's heart more than one treatment — the title itself offers \"another way\" — and heart was generally regarded as one of the cheaper things on the block. The pairing with bacon and redcurrant jelly is telling: both are standard British devices for lean, strongly flavoured meats, the bacon supplying fat the heart itself lacks and the jelly the sweet-sour note otherwise given to venison and mutton. Heart is a working muscle rather than true offal, closer in texture and flavour to steak than to liver or kidney, which is why it takes to quick frying at all; stuffing and braising or roasting the whole heart for hours is often said to have been the usual handling, and this \"another way\" is the quicker, more economical alternative offered alongside it.