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Beef Heart Stuffed
1 Heart 2 Tablespoons Barley Flour 1 Sliced Onion 1 Stalk Celery, Chopped Fine Pepper, Salt, Butter Wash thoroughly, cut into 1½ inch dice, put in a saucepan with water to
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence, and the title promises a stuffed heart while the method dices it — so read this as a braise with barley flour thickening rather than a stuffed roast. The points below cover what a cook needs to fill the gaps.
- The recipe is incompleteThe instructions stop at "with water to" — presumably "to cover." Nothing follows about simmering time, thickening or seasoning order, so the finish has to be supplied from general braising practice.
- Title versus methodCutting the heart into 1½-inch dice rules out stuffing it. Either the heading was carried over from a neighbouring recipe or the book compressed two methods; the diced version is what the text actually describes.
- Beef heart is a long-cook muscleIt is dense, very lean working muscle. Diced and barely covered with water it needs a slow, steady simmer of roughly 2 to 2½ hours before it turns tender; rushed at a hard boil it tends to go tough and dry.
- Trimming"Wash thoroughly" meant more than rinsing. Split the heart, cut out the valves, the hard white connective sheets and any clotted blood in the chambers before dicing. A whole beef heart runs 3 to 5 lb and loses a fair amount to trimming.
- Barley flourStill sold, usually in health-food aisles, and it thickens more softly than wheat flour with a faintly nutty taste. Two tablespoons will lightly body the cooking liquid, not make a thick gravy; slake it with cold water before stirring it in, near the end.
- Seasoning and butterSalt, pepper and butter are given without amounts. Salt lightly at the start and correct at the end, since the liquid reduces; a tablespoon of butter stirred in off the heat is enough to round out a lean braise.
- VesselA "saucepan" here means any deep covered pan on the stovetop. A heavy Dutch oven holds the low, even heat this cut wants better than thin aluminium.
- YieldOne beef heart, trimmed and diced, serves four to six with potatoes or noodles. Leftovers are good chopped fine into hash.
Heart sat in the same category as tongue, kidney and liver in household cookery: cheap, nourishing, and a test of whether a young housekeeper could stretch a food budget. A book aimed squarely at that reader is likely to give the organ meats plain, short entries rather than company-dinner treatment. Beef heart is muscle rather than true offal in texture and flavour — closer to a very lean pot roast than to liver — and two common treatments are the two this page seems to have collided: dice it and stew it long, or stuff the trimmed cavity with bread dressing and braise it whole. Barley flour as a thickener points to the same thrifty, slightly old-fashioned pantry.