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Sheep's Hearts
Soak the hearts in water, and wash them thoroughly. Cut away the pipes, and trim the hearts neatly. Fill with good veal forcemeat, and skewer thin slices of fat bacon round them. Roast before a clear fire, and baste liberally. Thicken a quarter of a pint of stock with a tea-spoonful of ground rice, flavour the sauce with ketchup, season with pepper and salt, and add a glass of wine if liked. Serve the hearts on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and send red currant jelly to table with them. The stuffing may be made with the ingredients in the following proportions. Shred a quarter of a pound of beef suet very finely. Mix with it two ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs, a dessert-spoonful of chopped parsley, a finely-minced shallot, a tea-spoonful of mixed sweet herbs, the hard-boiled yolk of an egg, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, moisten them with a tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, and bind them together with the yolk of a raw egg. This quantity of stuffing will be sufficient for two hearts. If liked, the strips of bacon can be left off, and the hearts tied round with oiled paper, which should be removed about twenty minutes before the heart is taken up, that it may brown. Time to roast the hearts, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 10d. each. Sufficient, two hearts for three persons.
A Victorian roast made from a cut most butchers now sell cheaply or give away. The whole thing turns on not overcooking: heart is dense, almost fat-free muscle that is tender when pink and leathery once it is grey.
- Buy and prepLamb or sheep hearts weigh 5-8 oz each; order them ahead from a butcher. Split the top open enough to reach inside, cut out the tubes, valves and any clotted blood in the chambers, then soak in cold water 30-60 minutes and rinse until the water runs clear.
- The hinge: donenessThree-quarters of an hour in front of a fierce open fire is not the same as 45 minutes in a closed oven. Heart is generally reckoned to be at its best cooked to about 140-145F at the thickest muscle and rested, going tight and rubbery much past 160F. Note the conflict, though: the stuffing is bound with raw egg yolk and sits at the coldest point of the joint, so it will lag well behind the meat. If you want the stuffing brought to a safe temperature (165F is the usual figure for stuffing), the heart itself will be cooked through; alternatively cook the forcemeat separately.
- Fire to oven"Roast before a clear fire" means a spit in front of radiant heat with a dripping pan below. In a modern oven use 400-425F, on a rack over a tray, basting every 10 minutes with the pan fat. An alternative treatment for hearts is a long, slow braise; this recipe is the fast one and should be kept fast.
- QuantitiesA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz British measure, about 140 ml, or a little under two-thirds of a US cup of stock. A "glass of wine" in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz. A dessert-spoonful is about two teaspoons.
- KetchupIn Victorian Britain this means mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment, not tomato ketchup, which is sweet and thick. A teaspoon or two of mushroom ketchup, or Worcestershire sauce at a pinch, gives the intended savoury edge; tomato ketchup will make the sauce sweet.
- Ground rice and suetGround rice is milled rice, coarser than rice flour but usable in the same way; a teaspoon will thicken the small quantity of stock lightly. Beef suet is still sold shredded in the UK and from butchers elsewhere; frozen grated beef fat works, and cold grated butter is an acceptable if less traditional substitute.
- Oiled paperThe paper jacket is a caul-less barding method. Use parchment brushed with oil or melted fat, tied with kitchen string, and pull it off for the last 20 minutes so the surface colours.
- ServingTwo hearts for three people is optimistic by modern appetites; allow one heart per person and scale the forcemeat, which the recipe sizes for two hearts. Red currant jelly on the side follows the usual British pairing with mutton and lamb.
Cassell's belongs to a period when a household cook was judged partly on what she could do with the cheap end of the carcass, and heart sat near the bottom of that scale: the recipe's own note of tenpence each puts it well below a joint of meat. Stuffing and roasting offal in this way, wrapped in bacon or barding paper and served with a thickened gravy and red currant jelly, dressed an economical organ in the full ceremony of a roast, right down to the sauce boat. The forcemeat here is the standard British stuffing of the era in miniature: suet, breadcrumbs, parsley, shallot, mixed sweet herbs and nutmeg, bound with egg. "Ketchup" as a flavouring for gravy is a reminder that the word long meant a family of thin, fermented, mushroom- or walnut-based sauces before tomato took over the name. Stuffed hearts remained ordinary British home cooking well into the twentieth century, kept alive by wartime rationing, in which offal was largely unrationed, before slipping out of everyday use.