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Calf's Heart Stuffed
Wash heart; fill with chicken stuffing; sprinkle with salt and pepper; dredge with flour. Place on rack in dripping pan and cook in hot oven from two to three hours, basting while cooking, with beef stock, pork fat, hot water, or butter.
Serve with Tomato Sauce or on a bed of boiled onions.
A plain roast of an organ meat that has largely dropped out of American cooking. The recipe assumes you know how to clean a heart and how to keep it from drying out, so those are the two places to spend attention.
- Cleaning comes first"Wash heart" is doing a lot of work. Split the top of the chambers, rinse out any clotted blood, and cut away the tough valve tissue, the surface membrane and the hard fat at the crown before stuffing. Soaking in cold salted water for an hour helps draw out remaining blood.
- "Hot oven" needs qualifyingIn cookbooks of this period a hot oven is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F, though authors differ. Held there for two to three hours a calf's heart, which is almost pure lean muscle, will simply turn grey and fibrous. Sear it in a hot oven for 20 minutes, then drop to about 325F and cover the pan so the long time works as a braise rather than a roast.
- Chicken stuffingThis presumably points to a stuffing recipe given elsewhere in the book, of the usual period type: soft breadcrumbs, melted butter, salt, pepper, and poultry seasoning or sage and thyme, bound with a little stock or egg. Roughly a cup will fill one calf's heart. Skewer or tie the opening shut so it stays in.
- Basting liquidThe four options given are not equivalent. Pork fat or butter give you browning and flavor; hot water gives you almost nothing. Beef stock is the best choice, and if the pan is covered it will also produce enough liquid to build a gravy.
- DonenessHeart is done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest part of the wall, not at a particular internal temperature. Two hours is usually enough for a calf's heart; a beef heart, two to three times the size, needs longer and should be cut into pieces.
- YieldA calf's heart runs about 1 to 1 1/2 lb and serves two or three when stuffed. Slice it across the grain, in thin slices, and serve with the pan juices strained into the tomato sauce.
- SourcingNot a supermarket item. Order from a halal or Latin butcher or a farm supplier, and ask for veal rather than beef heart if you want the shorter cooking time the recipe assumes.
Heart belongs to the class of cheap muscle cuts that American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treated as ordinary entrée material rather than as anything adventurous. It is lean, dense and inexpensive, and stuffing it looks like a way of making one small organ feed a family: the bread absorbs the juices, adds bulk, and turns the dish into something that carves like a small joint. Lowney's, published by a Boston chocolate company to promote its products, otherwise leans toward cakes and confections, but its entrée chapter reflects the general run of household cookery of the day, where thrift dictated that the whole animal be used. The pairing with tomato sauce or a bed of boiled onions may well have been a common answer to a very lean meat, supplying acidity and moisture that the heart itself does not have, though on this page it is only a single instance.