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Calf's Heart Stuffed
Wash the heart, stuff with forcemeat. Sew.
Arrange ½ cupful of onions and carrots in the bottom of a casserole, place the heart on this layer of vegetables. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and paprika, dredge with flour and bake in a hot oven for two and a half hours. Baste often with hot dripping. Remove from casserole and make a brown gravy, using 4 tablespoonfuls of the fat from the casserole, adding 3 tablespoonfuls of flour and 2 cupfuls of boiling water. Serve the gravy around the heart.
A plain braise-in-the-oven treatment of a cut most butchers now sell only by request. The instructions assume you know how to trim and stuff a heart, so most of the work here is in the preparation the recipe skips.
- Trim before you stuffSplit the heart down one side to open the chambers, then cut away the valves, the tough white tendon and any clotted blood inside. Rinse thoroughly in cold water; some cooks soak it an hour in salted water to draw out remaining blood.
- Casserole means the potIn a book of this vintage a casserole is a lidded, oven-safe cooking vessel, not a baked-in-a-dish assembly. A Dutch oven is the direct equivalent, and the lid matters: heart is lean muscle that dries out uncovered.
- "Hot oven" and the real timingA hot oven in period usage is generally given as somewhere around 400-450F, which risks scorching the outside over two and a half hours. Braise covered at about 325F instead; the long time is right, the high heat is not, and the flour dredge and vegetable bed both burn easily.
- ForcemeatNo quantity is given. A standard bread stuffing of about 1 to 1½ cups is enough for one calf's heart: soft breadcrumbs, minced onion, chopped suet or butter, salt, pepper and sage or thyme, bound with a little stock or egg. Pack it loosely so it does not burst the seam.
- Sewing and bastingClose the opening with a trussing needle and cotton kitchen twine, or fasten it with small skewers laced with string. Dripping is rendered beef or pork fat; melted butter or a spoonful of oil will do, and basting every 30 minutes is enough if the pot is lidded.
- The gravyFour tablespoons fat to three of flour to two cups liquid gives a medium-bodied brown gravy. Cook the roux until it smells nutty before adding the boiling water, and use the pan juices and strained vegetables in place of some of the water for better flavour.
- CarvingSlice across the grain, about ¼ inch thick, so each slice takes a little stuffing with it. Cut with the grain and the meat eats stringy.
- YieldA calf's heart runs roughly 1 to 1½ lb and serves three to four with the stuffing and gravy. A beef heart, the more common item today, is three to four times larger and needs proportionally more stuffing and time.
Heart sits at the muscular end of offal cookery: it is not soft like liver but dense working muscle, which is why cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly stuff it and give it hours of slow, moist heat rather than frying or grilling. Heart was among the cheapest things a butcher sold, and stuffing it with breadcrumbs stretched a small piece of meat into a joint that could be carved at table and served with gravy, giving the look of a roast at a fraction of the price. Calf's heart is often said to have been preferred to beef for its smaller size and milder flavour, and the same method appears in British and American household manuals under names such as "stuffed heart." Today it usually has to be ordered ahead.