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Stewed Bullock's Heart
Put a bullock's heart in a basin of water, wash it well and let it soak to clean out the blood. Take it out, dry on a cloth, cut in halves, rub well over with flour, put them in a fryingpan with a little butter and fry to a brown color. Put them in a saucepan with a sprig of thyme, and four or five onions cut in slices and fried, sprinkle over a little salt and pepper and pour in sufficient water to cover. Place the pan on the fire and cook slowly for about three hours, then remove, skim the fat from the liquor, reduce it, thicken and add one wineglassful of claret and one teaspoonful of moist sugar. Place the heart again in the saucepan, heat it up, put it on a dish, pour over the gravy and serve.
Khulash.
This dish is greatly esteemed in Germany, and is prepared as follows: Cut about two pounds of the head and fillet of beef into small squares. Cut up an onion into small pieces and fry it in a pan with a little butter, but not long enough to allow it to take color; add the pieces of meat and fry them for ten or fifteen minutes, add a little salt or cayenne and then remove the pan to the side of the fire and cover the lid with hot ashes. Let it remain for forty-five minutes when the moisture will all have evaporated, pour over a little gravy and continue to cook for an hour and a half. Dust over a little more cayenne, pour over two tablespoonfuls of brown sauce and cook for another ten minutes or so. Cut some potatoes in small dice or squares, blanch in cold water for a few minutes, roll them well in sauce, allow them to remain for a few minutes and serve.
Two dishes run together in one entry: a long braise of beef heart, and a version of goulash that the book calls German. Both are straightforward, but the vocabulary and the fire management need translating.
- Bullock's heartA bullock is a young steer, so this is simply a beef heart, usually 3 to 4 lb. Butchers who break whole carcasses will have them; expect to order ahead. Trim the hard vessels, valve tissue and fat cap at the top before flouring.
- The soakThe initial soaking is to draw out clotted blood from the chambers, which otherwise gives a strong metallic taste. An hour in several changes of cold water does it; rinse the chambers out under the tap first.
- Heat and timeHeart is very lean working muscle with a lot of connective tissue, so the hinge here is genuinely slow, barely trembling liquid. Three hours at a bare simmer, or covered in a 300F oven, gives sliceable meat; a rolling boil in the same three hours gives something tough and dry.
- Wineglassful and moist sugarA wineglass in period usage is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Moist sugar is unrefined soft brown sugar, so light brown sugar is the closest thing on a modern shelf.
- Reduce, thickenNo thickener is named. Skim the fat, boil the strained liquor down by about half, then thicken with a beurre manie or a spoonful of the frying flour slaked in cold water; the claret and sugar go in at the end so the wine keeps its edge.
- "Khulash"This is goulash, spelled by ear. Note there is no paprika in it at all; the book calls the dish German, and cayenne is doing the work instead.
- "Head and fillet of beef"An odd pairing, and unclear as written. For a braise of this length use chuck or shin cut in 3/4-inch dice; true fillet would be ruined by two and a half hours in a pot.
- Ashes on the lidHeaping hot ashes on the lid put heat on the meat from above while the pan sits at the side of the fire, the same principle as a camp Dutch oven. A covered pot in a low oven is the nearest modern approximation.
- The potatoes"Blanch in cold water" most likely means starting them in cold water and bringing them just to the boil to set them, not a full cooking. Drain well before turning them in the sauce or they will thin it.
- YieldThe heart serves four to six sliced thin; the goulash, from 2 lb of meat, serves four.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name fronted this 1896 volume, was compiling a working reference for a large hotel kitchen, not a menu of luxuries, and that is why an entry on bullock's heart sits comfortably among the terrapin and the canvasback. Offal was ordinary food in the 1890s, cheap enough for a boarding house and interesting enough for a chef, and a heart bought whole and braised for three hours fed a table for very little. The goulash tacked on at the end is more telling still: Tschirky was Swiss, the New York hotel trade was full of German-speaking cooks, and gulyas is often said to have reached American kitchens through that Central European route rather than directly from Hungary, which may be how it came to be labelled a German dish. The absence of paprika is at least suggestive of such a detour.