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Braised Beef Heart
This is an economical dish, but needs slow, careful cooking. Wash the heart very thoroughly, cutting down into the arterial openings to make sure that no blood clots remain. Trim off the tough top, then stuff with a good bread stuffing, to which chopped onion and a little sausage meat may be added to give flavor.
Fasten at the top with a couple of stitches. In a hot frying-pan melt 2 or 3 tablespoonfuls of beef dripping, and in this brown the heart, turning often, that all sides may be thoroughly and evenly colored. Transfer to a saucepan or casserole, arranging it point downward. Pour round it 1 pint of good soup stock, brown gravy or mixed brown and tomato sauce. Cover and simmer very gently for three hours adding more sauce as needed. Finally uncover and place in a hot oven for twenty minutes. Be sure to have the platter very hot and to send immediately to the table, as this meat is at its best when very hot.
Sauté of Heart Remove the pipes and flaps from a heart, cut it in moderately thick slices, and wash them to remove the blood. Dip each piece in flour to which pepper, paprika and salt have been added.
Fry the slices in hot dripping, and when they are cooked, keep them hot on a dish. Drain off the fat from the frying-pan, sprinkle over it 1 tablespoonful of flour, mix it into a smooth paste, with 1/2 cupful of water or stock, add 4 tablespoonfuls of vinegar from piccalilli, and 3 or 4 pieces of pickle cut very small. Bring the sauce to the boil, and pour it over the slices of fried heart.
Beef heart is lean, dense muscle that turns to leather over dry heat and to something close to pot roast over three hours of gentle liquid. The long, barely-trembling simmer is the whole recipe; everything else is seasoning.
- Keep the liquid below a boilHeart has almost no fat and a great deal of connective tissue. A hard boil squeezes the fibres tight and dries the meat; a bare simmer, somewhere around 180-190F, lets it slowly relax. Aim for the occasional lazy bubble for the full three hours.
- "Casserole" here means a potIn this period a casserole is a lidded, heavy, flameproof vessel used on the stovetop, not a shallow baking dish. A Dutch oven is the direct equivalent.
- Oven heat at the endThe book says only 'a hot oven'; in period usage that generally means somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Twenty minutes uncovered at that heat dries and glazes the surface after the long braise; watch that the remaining liquid does not scorch.
- Beef drippingRendered beef fat, saved from roasting. Any high-smoke-point fat browns the heart as well, though dripping does contribute flavour. Two or three tablespoons is enough for a good crust.
- The pint of stockOne US pint is 2 cups; if the book is British, an imperial pint is 20 fl oz. Either way the heart is not submerged, which is why the instruction to add more liquid as it reduces matters.
- Stuffing a whole heartBread stuffing packed inside a large piece of meat heats slowly. If you include sausage meat, keep the stuffing loose rather than compressed, and check that the centre has reached 165F before serving.
- TrimmingCut into the chambers and rinse out clots, then strip the tough silverskin, valves and any hard fat from the interior. These do not soften with cooking.
- YieldA beef heart runs roughly 3-4 lb trimmed and will serve about six; veal or lamb hearts are far smaller and need proportionately less time, perhaps an hour to an hour and a half by the same method.
- On the sauté variationSliced heart is the opposite proposition: cut no thicker than half an inch, flour it, and fry hot and fast. More than a few minutes a side and it toughens. The text gives 1½ cupfuls of water or stock against a single tablespoonful of flour, which will produce a thin sauce; adjust the liquid to the consistency you want.
Heart is dense muscle rather than soft offal, and thrift cookery has long treated it as such: it takes seasoning like beef, costs a fraction of it, and rewards the same slow moist treatment as a shin or a cheek. The stuffed, braised whole heart in this entry belongs to a long British and North American tradition of treating a large heart as a small roast, trussed with a couple of stitches and served on a scalding platter because lean meat sheds its heat fast. A second, quicker sauté recipe alongside the braise offers the cook a way to use part of the same purchase on a weeknight. The piccalilli vinegar and chopped pickle in that sauce reflect a habit of using up what was already in the pantry, down to the liquid in a jar of relish.