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Stewed Beef Heart
Wash the heart well, remove the muscles from the inside, and take out every particle of blood. Make a stuffing of one cup of bread crumbs; one tablespoon of chopped onion; one tablespoon of chopped celery; one tablespoon of butter; salt and pepper to taste. Mix these ingredients well together and stuff the cavity of the heart with them. Tie the heart about with twine, and wrap it in a cloth, sewing the ends together to keep the stuffing in. Place in a small stewpan, with the point of the heart down, and nearly cover with water, boiling hot. Place the lid on the pan, and simmer gently for three hours. When done there should be about one pint of water in the pan. Remove the cloth and place the heart on a platter. Add a little water to the pan, thicken the juices with a small quantity of flour or cornstarch wet in a little water, and season with salt and pepper. Pour the gravy over and around the heart.
A whole stuffed heart, simmered slowly and sliced at the table. The method is sound; only the vessels and the shopping have changed.
- The hinge: keep it at a bare simmerHeart is dense working muscle, almost pure lean, and it turns dry and grainy if the water is allowed to boil. Hold it at 180-190F so the surface barely trembles for the full three hours.
- Buying itA beef heart runs 3-4 lb and is usually a special order from a butcher; veal and lamb hearts are smaller and cook faster. If you get one already split open, tie it back into shape around the stuffing rather than looking for a whole cavity.
- "Remove the muscles from the inside"This means the coarse valve tissue, the sinewy cords and the fat cap at the top of the chambers. Trim them out with a small sharp knife and rinse the chambers thoroughly; residual blood in the chambers is usually blamed for the metallic taste of an untrimmed heart, which is why the recipe insists on taking out "every particle."
- The clothA square of muslin or cheesecloth sewn shut is the period method for holding stuffing in. Kitchen twine alone, tied at intervals like a roast, does the same job and is easier to remove.
- The stewpanA "small stewpan" here is a lidded pot only a little larger than the heart, so that the water nearly covers it. A 4- to 6-quart Dutch oven is about right, and it can go into a low oven (around 275-300F) instead of on the burner if the stovetop will not hold a low enough flame.
- DonenessThree hours is a reasonable estimate, not a rule. Test with a skewer through the thickest wall: it should meet no resistance. A large beef heart may want closer to four hours.
- The gravyA pint of liquid takes roughly 2 tablespoons of flour or 1 tablespoon of cornstarch slaked in cold water. Add it in a thin stream to the simmering liquid and cook a couple of minutes to lose the raw starch taste.
- ServingEnough for four to six. Rest the heart ten minutes, cut away the twine, and slice across the grain in thin rounds so each piece carries a little stuffing.
Heart sits in that class of cuts that Victorian and Edwardian household books treated as ordinary meat rather than novelty: cheap, lean, plentiful, and worth the labor of trimming and long simmering. American cookbooks of this period commonly gave space to the whole animal, and their meat chapters routinely cover heart, liver, kidney, tripe and tongue. Stuffing and cooking a heart whole is an old British and Northern European treatment; a stuffed heart appears in nineteenth-century English cookery under the name "love in disguise," a name generally explained as a joke on the heart hidden inside its coat of forcemeat. The dish faded from most American kitchens at least partly with the retail counter: as butchering moved out of the home and the neighborhood shop, organ meats were less often on display, and a cut that once needed no explanation became something you have to ask for.