Beef Heart
Parboil the heart until nearly tender, then gash and stuff with rich stuffing of loaf bread, seasoned with onion, salt, pepper, and sage. Then put in a pan and bake, turning it several times. Baste with gravy whilst baking.--Mrs. J.H.
A brief nineteenth-century note that assumes you already know how to handle offal. The gaps worth filling are the trimming, the parboiling time and the oven temperature.
- Buy and trim it firstA whole beef heart commonly runs 3-5 lb. Before anything else, cut away the hard white valves, the surface fat cap and any clotted blood in the chambers, then rinse well. The recipe says nothing about trimming; most modern packaging has not done it for you.
- "Parboil until nearly tender"On a whole beef heart this means a bare simmer for roughly 1.5 to 2 hours, not a rolling boil, which tightens the muscle. It should yield to a skewer but still resist. Keep the cooking liquid: it is the most likely source of the gravy referred to at the end.
- Oven heatNothing is specified, as usual. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this: hot enough to brown the stuffing and the outside, gentle enough that the second cooking does not seize the meat. Reckon on about an hour.
- "Gash and stuff"Beef heart is a hollow muscle, so the natural cavity takes most of the stuffing; the gashes are slits cut into the thick walls to hold the rest. Tie the whole thing with kitchen string or skewer it closed, or the stuffing will fall out when you turn it.
- Loaf breadThis means plain white household loaf, staled a day or two, torn or crumbed rather than cubed. Fresh soft sandwich bread turns to paste. Bind it with a little of the parboiling liquid and some butter or beef suet.
- Sage and onionThe seasoning is the familiar English bread forcemeat of the period. Dried rubbed sage or fresh both work; use about a teaspoon dried or a tablespoon chopped fresh to a quart of crumbs, and be sparing, as sage overwhelms quickly.
- Basting and gravy"Baste with gravy" most likely means the reserved parboiling broth, skimmed of fat and perhaps thickened with a little browned flour, though pan drippings would serve. Baste every fifteen minutes or so; heart carries little internal fat and dries out badly.
- ServingSlice across the grain, thinly. A stuffed heart of this size serves four to six with the stuffing counted as part of the dish. Leftovers are better cold and thinly sliced than reheated.
Heart sits at the sturdy end of the offal range: too lean and too muscular to be a delicacy, too large and too cheap to be thrown away. Stuffed and roasted heart is an old British farmhouse preparation that came to Virginia with English cooking, and the sage-and-onion bread forcemeat here is the same one those kitchens put in a goose or a shoulder of pork. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, many of them credited only by initials, which is why this recipe ends with "Mrs. J.H." rather than a full byline. Its terseness is the point: the contributors were writing for readers assumed to know what parboiling meant, and to need only the seasoning and the trick of gashing the walls to hold more stuffing. The two-stage method, simmer then bake, is the usual answer to a hard-working muscle, and stuffed-heart recipes of this kind persist in British regional cookery.