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Beef's Heart with Veal Stuffing
Soak the heart three hours in cold water, remove the muscles from the inside, and take out every atom of blood. Make a filling as follows: One pound of uncooked veal, chopped fine, a quarter pound of salt pork chopped fine, or a quarter pound of sausage meat, two heaping tablespoonfuls of dried bread crumbs, a tablespoonful of onion juice, one teaspoonful of salt, a quarter teaspoonful of black pepper, if you like, a dozen mushrooms chopped fine, and one egg slightly beaten. Mix all these ingredients well together, and stuff the heart. Wrap tightly in a cloth and sew it. Stand it in a small saucepan, with the point down, cover with boiling water, and simmer slowly three hours ; then take it out and remove the cloth. Bake in a quick oven one hour, basting every ten minutes with a little melted butter. Serve with a brown sauce.
This is also a nice cold dish, if cut in thin slices.
A whole beef heart, boiled in a cloth and then browned, is straightforward butchery cooking; the only fussy parts are the trimming and the double cooking time. Order the heart ahead, since it is rarely in the case.
- The trimming is the hingeThe interior valves, tendons and clotted blood in the chambers are what make heart taste strong. Cut out every piece of white connective tissue and rinse the chambers thoroughly; the three-hour cold soak is there to draw residual blood, and cutting it short may show in the finished flavour.
- Size and yieldA whole beef heart runs 3-4 lb trimmed and will serve six to eight, more if sliced thin as a cold dish. A veal or lamb heart is far smaller and would need the filling and times scaled down sharply.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F. It is there only to brown and set the outside after three hours of simmering, so watch it rather than trust the hour; forty minutes is often enough once the surface has coloured.
- Total cooking timeHeart is lean, dense muscle with no fat to protect it. Simmer until a skewer meets no resistance, generally 2 to 3 hours, and then finish in the oven. Four hours of combined cooking on a small heart will leave it dry and crumbly.
- Onion juiceA period ingredient: grate an onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a cloth. A tablespoon of juice takes roughly half a medium onion. Grated onion works and is less wasteful, though slightly wetter.
- The stuffingGround veal is now sold ready minced; the salt pork or sausage supplies the fat the veal lacks, so do not omit it. The mixture contains raw egg and raw pork, but it cooks through inside the heart during the long simmer.
- WrappingCheesecloth and kitchen twine do what the sewn cloth did. Wrap snugly so the stuffing cannot escape, and stand the heart point down in a pan just wide enough to hold it upright.
- Brown sauce and the cold serviceA simple espagnole or a roux-thickened gravy made from the cooking liquor, skimmed and reduced, is closer to what was meant than a modern pan sauce. If serving cold, chill the heart whole and refrigerate promptly rather than leaving it to cool on the counter.
Beef heart belongs to the long tradition of thrift cookery in which the working muscles of an animal, cheap because they demand time rather than skill, were dressed up with a forcemeat to eat like a roast. Stuffing a heart with veal and pork and boiling it in a cloth is a technique that resembles English puddings and galantines, where the cloth holds a shape that would otherwise slump. The recipe notes that it also makes a nice cold dish, and a stuffed heart cuts into neat rounds of meat and forcemeat that look considerably grander than the price of the raw material.