Calf's Heart
Wash a calf's heart, remove veins, arteries, and clotted blood. Stuff (using half quantity of Fish Stuffing I on page 164, seasoned highly with sage) and sew. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, roll in flour, and brown in hot fat. Place in small, deep baking-pan, half cover it with boiling water, cover closely, and bake slowly two hours, basting every fifteen minutes. It may be necessary to add more water. Remove heart from pan, and thicken the liquor with flour diluted with a small quantity of cold water. Season with salt and pepper, and pour around the heart before serving.
A braise in all but name: the heart is browned, half-submerged, and cooked covered until a fork goes in easily. Two details in the original need translating before you start.
- Fish Stuffing I is not made of fishIn Farmer's book that name means a crumb stuffing intended for fish. Turn to the recipe on page 164 for the ingredients and halve it; the instruction here is simply to season it highly with sage.
- "Bake slowly" means 300-325F"Bake slowly" calls for a low oven -- the book gives no temperatures, but something in the region of 300-325F answers to it. Hotter and the liquid boils rather than simmers, which tightens the muscle instead of softening it. Heart is lean working muscle; it needs low, wet heat for a long time.
- Buying the heartA calf's heart runs about 1 to 1.5 lb and will need ordering from a butcher. A beef heart, the more commonly found substitute, is 3 to 5 lb and wants closer to three hours; scale the stuffing accordingly.
- Trimming"Remove veins, arteries, and clotted blood" means opening the chambers, cutting out the tough valve tissue and connective cords, and rinsing until the water runs clear. Trim the hard fat cap as well.
- Skip most of the bastingWith the pan covered closely there is little evaporation from the exposed top, so opening it every fifteen minutes mainly loses heat. Check once an hour and top up the water if the level has dropped below halfway.
- Judge by tenderness, not the clockTwo hours is a starting figure. The heart is done when a skewer slides in with no resistance; undercooked heart is rubbery and no amount of gravy hides it.
- Thickening the liquorAbout 1 tablespoon flour slaked in 2 tablespoons cold water per cup of pan liquid, whisked in and simmered a couple of minutes to cook out the raw taste. Strain first if the browned flour from the searing has left specks.
- ServingOne calf's heart feeds three, four at a stretch. Let it rest ten minutes and slice across the grain in thin slices, as you would a small pot roast.
Stuffed and braised heart is old English and Scottish cookery, close kin to the stuffed sheep's or ox heart that appears in nineteenth-century British manuals, and it reached American cookbooks along the same line. What is telling is Farmer's economy of instruction: rather than print a second stuffing, she sends the reader to the fish stuffing already on page 164 and tells her to load it with sage, the herb traditionally paired with strong-tasting offal and pork. Organ meats are generally said to have faded from American home cooking over the course of the twentieth century, a decline often attributed to the growing cheapness of muscle cuts; they have come back largely through whole-animal butchery and restaurant menus rather than through the family kitchen.