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Heart, Calf's
Wash the heart very clean, soak it in vinegar and water, fill it with a forcemeat made of four ounces of crumb of bread, two ounces of butter, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, half a tea-spoonful of finely-minced lemon-rind, and a little salt and cayenne. Fasten the heart securely, and roast before a clear fire for from an hour and a half to two hours. Serve it with good melted butter mixed with a table-spoonful of lemon-juice or vinegar. A calf's heart is improved by partially boiling it before it is roasted. It may be baked, if more convenient, in a good oven, but in either case should be liberally basted. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A stuffed roast heart is straightforward once the organ is properly trimmed; the two things the original assumes you already know are how to clean the chambers and how to substitute an oven for an open fire.
- Trimming firstSplit the heart open enough to reach the ventricles, then cut away the valves, the tough interior membranes and any clotted blood. Rinse under cold running water, working the chambers open with your fingers, before the vinegar soak.
- The soakThe recipe gives no proportions or time. Roughly 1 part vinegar to 3 parts cold water for 30 minutes to an hour is a reasonable reading. It is there to draw out residual blood and slacken the strong flavour, not to marinate.
- Forcemeat quantitiesFour ounces of breadcrumbs is about 2 cups fresh crumbs; 2 oz butter is half a stick, softened, not melted. The mixture as written has no binder, so add a beaten egg if you want it to hold together as a stuffing rather than crumble out.
- "Fasten securely"Sew the opening with cotton kitchen twine or close it with small skewers and lace it shut. Heart contracts hard as it cooks and will push the forcemeat out of an unsecured cavity.
- Oven for open fireThe book says only 'a good oven' and gives no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Roast covered for the first hour so the muscle relaxes, then uncover to brown. Baste every 20 minutes with butter or dripping, as the original insists.
- ParboilingThe suggested partial boiling is worth doing: 30-40 minutes at a bare simmer before stuffing tenderises the dense muscle and cuts the roasting time to about an hour. Save the cooking liquid for gravy.
- DonenessHeart is lean muscle, not offal in the liver sense. Take it to about 160F at the centre and slice thin across the grain; pushed much beyond that it goes dry and rubbery, and undercooked it eats tough.
- The sauce"Good melted butter" in Victorian usage means a thin butter-and-flour sauce, not simply melted butter. A light roux-based sauce made with the parboiling liquid, finished with butter and the tablespoon of lemon juice, is what the recipe intends.
- Yield and costA calf's heart weighs roughly 1 to 2 lb and does serve four to five as written. The 'probable cost, 2s.' is a Victorian price note and no guide to anything today.
Cassell's treats heart as an unremarkable roast, which tells you how normal whole-carcass eating still was in the late nineteenth-century British kitchen: the dictionary gives entries for heart, lights, melts and palates alongside sirloin. Stuffing a heart with a bread forcemeat and roasting it before the fire is the same treatment given to a hare or a shoulder of mutton, and the vinegar soak and lemon-sharpened butter sauce are both doing the job of cutting a strong, iron-rich meat. Calf's heart was the mildest of the hearts commonly sold, and smaller and more tender than beef heart. The instruction to roast 'before a clear fire' while also allowing baking 'if more convenient' reflects a period in which the closed range was increasingly available as an alternative to the open hearth.