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Veal Pluck
Take a calf's heart, with the liver and lights. Wash the heart in several waters, let it soak for half an hour, drain and dry it, fill it with good veal forcemeat, tie thin slices of fat bacon round it, and roast or bake it. Soak the lights and part of the liver, boil them for an hour, and mince them. Put this mince into a stewpan with a little pepper and salt, the thin rind of half a lemon, half a blade of mace, and a pinch of grated nutmeg. Cover with gravy, and let it simmer gently till done enough. Season with pepper and salt, and add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a table-spoonful of ketchup, and a little strained lemon-juice. Slice the remainder of the liver, and fry in the usual way (see LIVER, FRIED). Place the mince upon a dish, put the heart upon it, and garnish the dish with the fried liver, fried rashers of bacon, toasted sippets, and parsley. Serve very hot, and send good brown gravy to table with it. Time, one hour and a half to roast the heart; half an hour to simmer the mince in the gravy.
A whole-offal set piece: one calf's pluck yields three preparations that come to the table on a single dish. The main obstacles today are sourcing and one badly dated cooking time.
- What a pluck isThe pluck is the heart, liver and lungs ("lights") lifted out of the carcass together, along with the windpipe. Butchers rarely sell them as a set now; you would order the pieces separately from a halal or traditional butcher, or a farm that sells offal.
- Lights are not sold in the United StatesUSDA regulations prohibit the sale of animal lungs for human food, so the minced-lung element cannot be reproduced there. In the UK and much of Europe lamb and calf lights are still available on order. The mince works with liver alone if you skip them.
- Ketchup means mushroom or walnutIn a book of this date, an unqualified table-spoonful of ketchup is most likely mushroom ketchup, walnut being the other common sort — thin, dark and salty rather than sweet. Tomato ketchup will make the gravy sweet and wrong. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; a little Worcestershire or a dash of soy is closer in spirit than the tomato bottle.
- Mace and lemon rindA blade of mace is a small quantity; half a blade is little more than a pinch, well under a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, though whole blades are worth buying since they can be fished out. Pare the lemon rind with a peeler so no white pith goes in — pith will turn the gravy bitter over half an hour of simmering.
- Roasting the heartThe recipe gives no oven temperature, only 'roast or bake'; a moderate oven is the usual reading for a book of this kind. A calf's heart runs 1–1.5 lb and is dense working muscle; the ninety minutes the recipe allows, barded in fat bacon, is about right, and a stuffed heart should be cooked through rather than left underdone. Rest it ten minutes before slicing across the grain.
- ForcemeatVictorian veal forcemeat is breadcrumbs, chopped suet or bacon fat, lemon zest, parsley, thyme, mace and egg to bind. Pack the ventricles loosely — the stuffing swells and can split the heart open.
- The liver, friedCut slices no thicker than a centimetre and give them a minute or two a side in the bacon fat. Calf's liver goes grainy and dry the moment it is cooked through, and it is a garnish here, not the main event.
- SippetsTriangles of bread fried in dripping or toasted and cut to points, set round the rim of the dish. They are there to soak up the gravy and to give the platter an edge.
- YieldOne calf's pluck arranged this way feeds four to six as a main course, with the brown gravy sent separately in a boat.
"Pluck" is the butcher's word for the organs plucked from the chest cavity in one connected mass — heart, liver, lungs and windpipe — the same set of parts that goes into a Scottish haggis. The dish as Cassell's gives it is a lesson in economy: a single pluck, bought cheaply as a unit, is made to produce a roast, a mince and a fry, plated together so that nothing looks like a leftover. Nineteenth-century British households ate far more offal than modern ones, partly from thrift and partly, it is often said, because refrigeration was poor and organs, which spoil fastest, were best cooked soon after buying. The dish fell out of use less through changing taste than through changing supply — lungs were removed from the legal food chain in the United States in 1971, and butchers who break carcasses on the premises, the only people able to hand over a whole pluck, became scarce.