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Ox Heart, Baked
Wash the heart in several waters. Cut away the lobes, and let it soak for three hours in vinegar and water. Drain, and slice into thin steaks cut the long way of the heart. Grease a pie-dish, and lay some sliced potatoes at the bottom of it. Put two or three rashers of bacon on these, then the heart, then bacon again, and afterwards more potatoes, and repeat until the dish is full, being careful to put potatoes on the top of all. Dredge a little pepper over each layer as it is put in, and salt if required. This will depend upon the quality of the bacon. Pour half a pint of water over the whole, and bake in a moderate oven. A little browning added to the gravy will improve the appearance. Time to bake, one hour and a half. (See HEART, BULLOCK'S.) OX HEEL STOCK FOR JELLY. Follow the directions given in CALF'S FOOT STOCK FOR
A layered braise in a pie-dish, closer to a Lancashire hotpot than to a roast. The main thing standing between you and a good result is thickness: heart is dense, lean muscle, and it must be sliced thin or the ninety minutes given here will not be enough.
- Slice thin, across the grainSlice thin -- "Thin steaks cut the long way of the heart" means long strips from the whole muscle; keep them no more than about 1/4 inch. Thicker pieces stay chewy well past the stated time.
- Cutting away the lobesThis means trimming off the top of the heart with its valves, tough fibrous cords and any clotted blood in the chambers, plus the hard fat around the outside. On a whole ox heart of 4 to 5 lb you will lose a fair amount of weight to trimming.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F, though the book gives no temperature. Covering the dish with foil or a lid for the first hour and uncovering for the last 20 to 30 minutes will steam the layers and then brown the top potatoes.
- Half a pint of waterCassell's is using the Imperial pint, so 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 US cups. Stock will give a better gravy than plain water and makes the "browning" unnecessary.
- BrowningVictorian gravy browning was burnt-sugar caramel colouring, sold in bottles. Modern gravy browning does the same job and is essentially colour; a teaspoon of dark soy will also darken the gravy, but it adds salt and savour of its own.
- The vinegar soakThree hours in vinegar and water draws out blood and blunts the iron-heavy taste. The book gives no proportions; roughly one part vinegar to four of water works, and it is worth rinsing before draining or the dish can turn sour.
- Salt and baconThe book leaves salting to the cook because bacon of the period varied widely in saltiness. Ordinary modern streaky bacon is on the milder side, so expect to salt the layers lightly yourself.
- Yield and timing checkA whole trimmed ox heart with potatoes fills a large deep dish and feeds six to eight. Test a slice at 90 minutes; if it still resists, another 30 to 45 minutes covered at 325F will help, as heart benefits from a longer, gentler braise than the book allows.
Heart sat at the cheap end of the offal counter, and Victorian cookbooks treated it as a serious meat rather than a novelty: Cassell's, in circulation from the 1870s and reissued for decades, gives it its own entries and cross-references to bullock's heart elsewhere in the dictionary. Layered between bacon and sliced potatoes in a pie-dish, this is the same logic as the northern English hotpot, where a tough or lean cut is stretched with cheap starch and made palatable by long, moist cooking in a single vessel that goes to table as it is. The vinegar soak is characteristic of the period's handling of dark, blood-rich meats, and the bottle of "browning" on the shelf tells you how much Victorian cooks cared about the colour of a gravy. Ox heart largely disappeared from British and American home cooking after the middle of the twentieth century, though it has never left Peruvian anticuchos or the offal traditions of much of continental Europe.