Home › Seven Weeks' Menus › Baked Calves' Hearts
Baked Calves' Hearts
Wash, trim, remove large arteries and clots of blood from 4 calves' hearts. Stuff, allowing for each heart 1 tablespoon bread crumbs well seasoned with thyme, onion juice, salt and pepper, moistened with melted shortening. Lard the sides of hearts with three rows of fine lardoons. Brown them, then stand them on end in small deep baking pan, half covered with boiling water. Cover closely, bake slowly for two hours. Baste every fifteen minutes or so. When done, remove hearts to hot platter, thicken broth with flour moistened with cold water to a paste. Boil up well, season, and pour over the hearts on platter. Serves 8.
A straightforward braise dressed up with larding and a bread stuffing. The hinge is the low, slow, covered cooking: heart is dense working muscle and only long moist heat makes it tender.
- "Bake slowly" means 300-325F"Bake slowly" suggests a low oven -- roughly 300-325F in modern terms. Books of this period place a "slow oven" anywhere from about 250F to 325F, and the recipe itself gives no figure. Anything hotter tightens the muscle before the connective tissue has a chance to soften, and two hours will give you something closer to a rubber ball than a roast.
- Sourcing the heartsCalves' hearts are usually a special order from a butcher rather than a case item; each runs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb. Beef heart, which is far easier to find, is considerably larger (commonly 3 lb and up) and will need appreciably longer by the same method. Lamb hearts are much smaller and correspondingly quicker.
- TrimmingThe instruction to remove arteries and clots is the whole of the prep and worth doing thoroughly. Split into the chambers with kitchen shears, rinse out any remaining blood, and cut away the tough white valve tissue and the fat cap at the top, which will not render down.
- The stuffing quantity reads lightOne tablespoon of crumbs per heart barely lines the chambers; the cavities of a calf's heart will take closer to 1/3 to 1/2 cup each. Scale the seasoned crumbs up to suit, and secure the openings with a skewer or a few stitches of twine so the filling stays in during basting.
- LardoonsLarding means threading strips of firm pork fat through the surface of the meat with a larding needle, which very few kitchens now own. Wrapping the hearts in bacon or thin sheets of fatback achieves the same purpose, since heart has almost no internal fat of its own.
- "Shortening" hereIn a book of this vintage shortening covers lard, drippings or a vegetable fat interchangeably. Melted butter is the easiest modern stand-in for moistening the crumbs.
- Cover closelyWith the hearts only half covered by water and a two-hour bake, a poor seal lets the liquid boil away and the exposed tops dry out. Use a lid or a double layer of foil crimped tight, and check the water level when you baste.
- The gravyA flour-and-cold-water slurry needs a good two to three minutes at a full boil to lose its raw taste. Reckon on about 1 tablespoon flour per cup of pan liquid, and skim the fat before thickening.
- ServingEight portions from four hearts means half a heart each, sliced crosswise so each slice shows a ring of stuffing. Serve hot, on a warmed platter; heart fat congeals quickly and the dish is unpleasant lukewarm.
Heart sits in the odd middle ground of offal: it is plain muscle, leaner and milder than liver or kidney, but it was priced as a cheap cut and treated as one. Stuffed and braised whole is its classic English-language handling, close cousin to the Scottish and northern English stuffed sheep's heart, and the herb-and-onion breadcrumb filling here is the same mixture that would have gone into a roast fowl. The larding gives this version a more formal finish than thrift cookery usually ran to. The habit of cooking heart faded through the second half of the twentieth century in the United States and Britain, and it is now as often met with grilled in skewered slices as braised whole.