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SHEEP'S HEARTS (another way)
Prepare a seasoning as for a duck, viz., onions, sage, bread-crumbs, pepper, and salt. Take one heart, or more if required; fill well with the seasoning, and fasten up the aperture with a small iron skewer or needle and thread. Place two or three lumps of sugar, or a little brown sugar, in the bottom of a stewpan with a few drops of water; when this is dissolved into a brown or burnt-looking colouring, add a little more water, with a good-sized lump of butter or dripping. Put in the hearts, turning them till they are a rich brown; add enough stock to nearly cover them, with a flavouring of a little sauce, pepper, salt, and vinegar, which will give a piquancy. Stew slowly for two hours.
A plain braise of stuffed hearts, lifted by a caramel-and-vinegar liquor that does most of the work. Two things decide the result: the heart must be properly trimmed and rinsed before stuffing, and the stew must never do more than shiver.
- Buying and trimmingSheep (lamb) hearts weigh roughly 5-7 oz each and are sold by halal butchers, farm shops and online game and offal suppliers. Split the top to open the chambers, cut out the tough valve membranes and any tubes, and rinse the interior thoroughly to remove clotted blood, which otherwise turns the stuffing grey and bitter.
- "Seasoning as for a duck"Victorian duck stuffing is onion and sage: for two hearts, about 1 chopped onion softened in butter, 2 oz fresh breadcrumbs, 1-2 tsp chopped sage, salt and pepper, bound with a little beaten egg or stock. Pack it loosely, since it swells.
- Closing the cavityA poultry skewer works, but stitching with cotton thread or trussing string is more reliable over two hours of stewing. Cotton, not synthetic thread.
- The burnt sugarThis is caramel colouring made in the pan: about 1 tbsp sugar with a few drops of water, taken to a dark amber, not black. Adding "a little more water" to hot caramel spits violently, so add it off the heat and stand back. Push it past dark brown and the whole dish turns acrid.
- "A flavouring of a little sauce"Probably a bottled sauce of the period, such as Worcestershire or mushroom ketchup. A teaspoon or two is enough, with about a tablespoon of vinegar for the piquancy called for.
- DrippingBeef dripping is still sold and gives the right savour; butter, lard or a neutral oil all work. Roughly 1 oz for two hearts.
- Heat and timeHeart is dense working muscle with a lot of collagen, so it needs a bare simmer, not a boil, for the full two hours. Covered in a low oven at 300F is easier to control than a stovetop pan. It is done when a skewer meets no resistance; undercooked heart is distinctly rubbery.
- Yield and servingOne heart per person. Reduce the strained liquor by half, or thicken it lightly with a beurre manié, and serve with mashed potato and a green vegetable. Slice the hearts across so each portion shows the stuffing.
Sheep's hearts belong to the frugal end of Victorian meat cookery, where every part of the carcass had a settled place and offal was cheap enough to be everyday food rather than a curiosity. The treatment here is essentially the one given to a duck or a shoulder of mutton scaled down: sage-and-onion stuffing, a browned exterior, a long moist stew. The burnt-sugar step is a domestic version of the professional kitchen's caramel or browning, sold in bottles as gravy colouring by the later nineteenth century, and it survived in British home cooking well into the twentieth. Stuffed hearts remained a Sunday dish in parts of Britain and Ireland within living memory; their retreat from butchers' counters is often attributed to the decline of the offal trade rather than to any change in how well the dish eats, though the causes were probably more various than that.