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Roasted Bullock's Heart
Put a heart in a basin of warm water and let it soak for an hour to take out all the blood. Take it out, wipe dry with a cloth, stuff it with some highly seasoned forcemeat, tie round a piece of well-buttered paper, pass a spit through it and place it in front of a clear fire to roast, basting frequently with butter. When done (it will take about two hours), remove the paper, put it on a dish, pour over piquant sauce or a little rich gravy.
A beef heart is dense, lean working muscle, and the single thing that decides the outcome is how you treat that leanness. Everything else here is straightforward butchery and a spit.
- What a bullock's heart isA bullock is a young steer, so this is a beef heart — usually 3 to 5 lb, occasionally larger. Butchers still sell them cheaply on request, often frozen. Trim the hard fat cap, the tough top valves and any exposed tubes before you start.
- The soakAn hour in warm water is meant to draw out residual blood from the chambers. Cold or lukewarm water is safer and works as well; flush the cavities under the tap first, and refrigerate rather than leaving a heart sitting at room temperature for the full hour.
- Forcemeat"Highly seasoned forcemeat" in Oscar's day meant a veal or pork farce with breadcrumbs, suet, onion, herbs, mace and plenty of pepper — closer to a stuffing than a smooth mousseline. About 1 to 1½ cups fills a heart's cavity. Sew or skewer the opening shut so it does not empty during cooking.
- The buttered paperThis works like barding: heart has almost no internal fat and will dry out naked in front of a fire, and the greased paper shields it. Buttered parchment, tied on with kitchen string, does the same job in an oven. Remove it for the last twenty minutes if you want colour.
- Spit becomes ovenWithout a clear fire and a spit, roast at 325–350F on a rack, basting with butter every fifteen or twenty minutes. Two hours is about right for a 4 lb stuffed heart and is intentionally long — a whole heart has a good deal of connective tissue that needs time to soften, so don't treat it like a rump roast and pull it early.
- DonenessThe stuffing is the limiting factor if it contains raw pork or veal: bring the centre of the forcemeat to 165F. The heart itself will be well done long before that, which is what this recipe wants.
- Piquant sauceSauce piquante of the period is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallots, gherkins and capers. The acid is not merely decoration — it cuts the strong iron flavour of the meat; the recipe's alternative of plain rich gravy leaves that unbalanced.
- Yield and carvingA stuffed 4 lb heart serves six to eight. Carve it in thin slices across the grain; thick slices are noticeably chewy. Let it rest ten minutes first.
Heart sits in the group of offal cuts that were once ordinary and are now a specialty order — cheap, nourishing, and demanding enough technique that cookbooks felt obliged to explain them. Stuffed and roasted heart has a long life in British cookery, where it appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books much as it does here: soaked, filled with forcemeat, barded, spitted before the fire, and sauced sharply. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his 1896 book as a comprehensive household reference rather than a hotel menu, and it includes a great many economical dishes that never touched a Waldorf dining room. The spit and the clear fire were already becoming nostalgic by the time he wrote — American kitchens had largely moved to closed ranges — and the buttered paper does the same work either way: it keeps a lean cut from scorching before it is cooked through.