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Stuffed Hearts with Vegetables
Clean and wash calves' hearts, stuff, skewer into shape, lard, season with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in pork fat, adding to fat one stalk celery, one tablespoon chopped onion, two sprigs parsley, four slices carrot cut in pieces, half the quantity of turnip, a bit of bay leaf, two cloves, and one-fourth teaspoon peppercorns. Turn hearts occasionally until well browned, then add one and one-half cups Brown Stock, cover, and cook slowly one and one-half hours. Serve with cooked carrots and turnips cut in strips or fancy shapes.
A straightforward braise whose only real difficulty is sourcing the main ingredient. Heart is dense working muscle with almost no fat, so the browning and the long covered cooking are both doing necessary work.
- The hinge: low and slow, tightly coveredHeart toughens and dries at a hard simmer. Keep the liquid at a bare tremble, lid on, and check that the stock has not cooked away; add water if it does. An hour and a half is a minimum for calves' hearts, and older beef heart may want two and a half to three hours before it slices tenderly.
- Sourcing the heartsCalves' hearts are usually a special order from a butcher; beef heart, split and trimmed, is a common stand-in, though a whole beef heart is much larger and will serve more. Trim away the surface fat, the tough valve tissue and the large vessels at the top, and rinse out any clotted blood before stuffing.
- "Stuff"No stuffing is specified. A standard bread stuffing of the period would serve: soft breadcrumbs, melted butter, salt, pepper, and a little sage or savory, moistened just enough to hold together. Roughly a cup will fill two calves' hearts. Do not pack it, as it swells.
- LardingThreading strips of salt pork through the meat with a larding needle, which almost no one has now. Draping the hearts with a few slices of bacon or salt pork before covering does much the same job of basting lean muscle from outside.
- Pork fat and skewersAny rendered pork fat or bacon drippings will do for the sauté; about two tablespoons. "Skewer into shape" means closing the cavity with poultry skewers or, more simply, a few loops of butcher's twine.
- Brown StockThe book's own recipe, made from browned beef shin and bones. Good unsalted beef stock is a fair stand-in; if you use commercial stock, hold back on the salt until the braise is finished, since it reduces.
- Stovetop or ovenA heavy Dutch oven on the lowest burner works, and so does a 325F oven, which holds the temperature steadier and needs less watching.
- Serving and yieldThe recipe states no yield; two calves' hearts will serve roughly four. Strain the braising liquid, skim the fat and reduce it briefly for a sauce; the vegetables cooked in it have given up much of their flavor, which is presumably why fresh carrots and turnips are cooked separately for the plate.
Heart sits with tongue, liver and tripe among the cuts late-nineteenth-century American cookbooks treated as ordinary household economy rather than novelty. It is a classic braise built like a pot roast: sear hard for color, add an aromatic mirepoix with bay, cloves and peppercorns, moisten with brown stock, then cook covered until the muscle relents. The larding and the vegetables cut "in strips or fancy shapes" point to the French-influenced cooking-school training of the period, dressing up a cheap organ for a dining table. Heart became steadily less common in American home cooking through the twentieth century as retail butchering consolidated and offal moved into pet food and processed meat, though it remains standard in Peruvian anticuchos and across much of Europe and Asia.