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Sheep's Harslet, Hashed
Take the liver, heart, and lights of a sheep, and wash them well in several waters. Boil them gently till tender in salted water, carefully removing the scum as it rises. Mince them finely season with pepper and salt, and add a seasoning of powdered herbs, if liked. Moisten the mince with stock, thicken with brown thickening, and stir it over the fire till it is quite hot. Serve on a hot dish, and send potatoes and boiled carrots to table with it. A few pickles may be served with it, if desired. Time to stew the meat, an hour and a half, or till tender. Probable cost, variable, but inexpensive. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward offal hash of the kind Victorian kitchens made from the pluck of a sheep. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the three organs need sourcing and one of them may be unobtainable where you live.
- "Harslet" and "lights"Harslet (also haslet) means the pluck — the liver, heart and lungs taken together. "Lights" are the lungs, usually said to be so called from their lightness.
- Lungs may be unavailableThe USDA prohibits lungs in food sold for human consumption in the United States, so sheep's lights are not obtainable there through normal channels. In the UK and much of Europe they are still sold by butchers who handle pluck. Made with liver and heart alone the dish works perfectly well.
- Cook the organs separatelyThe recipe boils all three together, but they are not equal. Heart wants a good hour to ninety minutes to become tender; liver is done in fifteen to twenty minutes and turns grainy and bitter if pushed past that. Start the heart, add the liver near the end.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in butter or dripping until it takes a nut-brown colour, kept in a jar and whisked into gravies. Roughly equal weights of fat and flour, browned slowly; two tablespoons of each will thicken about a pint of stock.
- Soaking and washing"Several waters" is doing real work. Rinsing and then soaking the liver and heart in cold water or milk for an hour draws out blood and mutes the metallic edge of the offal.
- Powdered herbsA typical period mixture is dried thyme, marjoram, sage and a little parsley, rubbed to a powder through a sieve; the recipe itself specifies none. A teaspoon of dried mixed herbs stands in for it.
- Do not boil the finished minceOnce the minced offal is moistened and thickened it only wants to be brought up to heat and held there. Boiling tightens liver into hard little pellets.
- ServingFour to five as written. The recipe treats pickles as optional, but the acidity does help keep the richness of the liver in check.
Harslet is an old word in the English kitchen for the edible interior of an animal, coming into use from Old French — where it is generally said to have denoted meat roast on a spit — and appearing in cookery writing for centuries. The dish belongs to the economy of whole-carcass butchery: the pluck was cheap, perishable and sold quickly, so cookbooks were expected to say what to do with it. The entry's own note — "probable cost, variable, but inexpensive" — places it squarely at the frugal end of the book. Hashing was the standard Victorian treatment for anything boiled and tender: mince it, bind it in a brown sauce, and it becomes a hot dish fit for a table rather than a plate of boiled organ meat. The same logic produced Lincolnshire haslet, a baked pork loaf that keeps the name long after the pluck itself dropped out of the recipe.