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Stewed Sheep's Hearts
Wash and dry the desired quantity of hearts, make a stuffing with sifted breadcrumbs, two-thirds the quantity of beef suet, a tablespoonful of flour, a small quantity of chopped parsley and sweet herbs, grated lemon peel and nutmeg, and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Stuff the hearts with this mixture, dip them in milk, roll them in flour, place them in a saucepan broad end downward with a piece of butter and fry until brown all over; then pour in one pint of stock, and simmer until the hearts are tender, which will take about one hour and a half. Remove the hearts, drain, and place them on a dish, keeping them hot while the gravy is being prepared. Skim the fat off the gravy, thicken it with a small quantity of flour, mix with it one wineglassful of claret and one tablespoonful of powdered sugar, pour it over the hearts, and serve them with currant jelly.
A straightforward braise, but the original assumes you know how to handle offal and gives no fixed quantities. A few things need pinning down.
- Sourcing and trimmingLamb or sheep hearts come from a butcher or a halal market; each weighs roughly 6-9 oz, so figure one per person. Split the top to open the chambers, cut out the visible tubes, valves and any clotted blood, and rinse well before stuffing.
- The stuffing, in proportionOscar gives the crumb-to-suet ratio rather than amounts. Work from about 1 cup dry breadcrumbs to 2/3 cup finely chopped or grated beef suet, plus the tablespoon of flour, a little chopped parsley, a pinch of mixed dried herbs, the zest of half a lemon and a good grating of nutmeg. Stuff each heart as full as it will take and judge the quantity from there.
- Suet substitutionBeef suet is still sold by butchers and online; frozen and grated it behaves best. Cold unsalted butter, cut in, is the usual stand-in, though it melts out sooner and the stuffing will be softer.
- Secure the stuffingNothing in the text holds it in. Skewer the opening shut with a toothpick or tie the heart with kitchen twine, or the filling will wash out into the stock during ninety minutes of simmering.
- The long simmer is the pointHeart is dense working muscle with almost no fat. An hour and a half at a bare simmer, barely bubbling, is what makes it sliceable; a hard boil in the same time leaves it dry and grainy. Add water if the pint of stock reduces too far.
- A wineglassfulConventionally reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, about a quarter cup, of claret, meaning a dry red Bordeaux or any dry red. With the tablespoon of sugar the gravy leans sweet-sour, which is why the currant jelly is not redundant.
- ServingLet the hearts rest a few minutes, then slice crosswise so each portion shows a ring of meat around the stuffing. Mashed or boiled potatoes take the gravy well.
Stuffed and braised heart is old English farmhouse cookery, and the treatment here, suet forcemeat with lemon peel and nutmeg, red wine in the gravy, currant jelly alongside, is the same one nineteenth-century books gave to hare and venison, which tells you how sheep's heart was understood: as dark, lean, faintly gamey meat needing fat inside it and sweetness beside it. Its presence in a book bearing the name of Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's long-serving maitre d'hotel, is a reminder that his 1896 volume was a working compendium of some nine hundred pages rather than a hotel menu, running from lobster Newburg to the cheapest cuts on the butcher's block. Offal was ordinary food in 1896 and hearts were among the least expensive things a household could buy; the recipe's opening phrase, "the desired quantity," quietly acknowledges that the cook would purchase according to how many mouths there were rather than by any set rule.