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To Roast an Ox Heart
Wash it well and clean all the blood carefully from the pipes; parboil it ten or fifteen minutes in boiling water; drain and put in a stuffing which has been made of bread crumbs, minced suet or butter, thyme or parsley, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
Put it down to roast while hot, baste it well with butter, and just before serving, stir one tablespoonful currant jelly into the gravy. To roast, allow twenty minutes to every pound.--Mrs. A.M.D.
A whole beef heart is lean, dense muscle with almost no marbling, which makes the original 20-minutes-per-pound rule the one thing worth reconsidering. Everything else translates cleanly.
- Butchery first"Clean all the blood carefully from the pipes" means opening the chambers, cutting away the valves, the heavy vessels at the top, and any clotted blood, then rinsing under cold water. Trim the tough outer membrane and interior silverskin as well; it will not soften with roasting.
- Buying itA beef heart commonly runs from about 3 lb up to 8 lb, and a large one will serve six to eight; the book gives no yield. Veal or lamb hearts are far smaller and will overcook long before the stated time. Order ahead from a butcher and ask for it whole rather than sliced.
- "Put it down to roast"Whether this meant a spit before the fire or a stove oven the recipe does not say; the book gives no temperature at all. In a modern oven, around 350F in a roasting pan with a rack is a reasonable working choice.
- The timingTwenty minutes a pound puts a 4 lb heart at eighty minutes, which will be grey and firm all through. Heart has no fat to lubricate it and toughens rapidly past medium. Either roast to an internal 135-140F and rest it, or commit to the opposite approach and braise it covered with liquid for two to three hours until genuinely tender. The middle ground is where it goes leathery.
- ParboilingThe ten to fifteen minutes in boiling water firms the meat and draws off residual blood. Drain, stuff, and put it down to roast while hot, as directed.
- Stuffing quantitiesNone are given. About 2 cups fresh breadcrumbs, 4 oz minced suet or 4 tablespoons butter, a tablespoon of chopped thyme or parsley, salt, pepper and a grating of nutmeg fills a large heart. Skewer the opening shut or tie it with kitchen twine, or the stuffing works loose in the pan.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and not interchangeable with the shredded packaged suet sold for puddings, which is often part flour. Butter is the stated alternative and works.
- Basting and the gravyBaste every fifteen minutes; there is no internal fat to do the job. The tablespoon of currant jelly stirred into the pan gravy at the end is the standard nineteenth-century sweet-tart finish for lean red meat and game, and it matters more here than it looks: without it the sauce is thin and flat.
Heart had a place in the Virginia household economy: a beef heart is a large, cheap, muscular cut, and a book like Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), assembled from contributions by Virginia housewives credited variously by name and, as here, by initials only, includes it among its general household fare. The treatment here is thoroughly English in descent parboil, stuff with breadcrumbs and suet, roast, serve with currant jelly and is close to what stuffed hearts look like in British cookery of the same century, where the jelly signals that the meat is being handled like venison or mutton rather than like offal. The attribution to "Mrs. A.M.D." is typical of the book's method, which gathered recipes as they were actually cooked in particular kitchens instead of standardizing them. Heart is generally said to have faded from American home cooking in the twentieth century as cheap muscle cuts became plentiful, and has returned mainly through whole-animal butchery and grilled preparations such as Peruvian anticuchos.