Stuffed Heart
Take a beef's or sheep's or veal's heart, wash deeply and thoroughly so as to remove all blood, make the two cells into one by cutting through the partition with a long, sharp knife, being careful not to cut through to the outside; make a stuffing of bread crumbs same as for roast turkey, fill the cavity, cover with greased paper or cloth to secure stuffing, and bake in a deep pan with plenty of water, for two hours or longer, basting and turning often, as the upper part particularly is apt to get dry. While heart is roasting, put the valves or "deaf ears," which must be cut off after washing, into a saucepan, with pint of cold water and a sliced onion. Let simmer slowly one hour; melt in saucepan tablespoon of butter, add a tablespoon flour, then the strained liquor from valves, and serve as gravy.
A braise pretending to be a roast: the deep pan of water and the two-hour clock are doing the real work, because heart is a hard-working muscle that only turns tender with long, moist heat. Everything else follows from that.
- Choose your heart and adjust the timeA beef heart runs 3-5 lb, veal about 1 lb, lamb or sheep nearer 4-8 oz. The recipe's two hours ("or longer") suits a beef heart; veal wants roughly 90 minutes and a lamb heart closer to an hour, or it will be dry rather than tender.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Treat it as a braise at 325F. Note that the recipe's warning that the upper part dries, and its instruction to baste and turn, imply an uncovered pan; if you cover it to stop the liquid boiling away, uncover for the last half hour for colour.
- TrimmingBeyond washing out the blood, cut away the tough white cords, the hard fat at the top and any tubes at the base. Left in, they stay rubbery no matter how long the heart cooks.
- "Deaf ears"The atria, the two flaps of thinner muscle at the top of the heart. They are trimmed off and simmered separately here purely to make a meat stock for the gravy; the modern equivalent is any well-flavoured beef or veal stock if your butcher has already removed them.
- Stuffing quantities"Same as for roast turkey" means a plain bread dressing: roughly 2 cups soft crumbs, 2 tbsp melted butter, a small chopped onion softened first, sage or thyme, salt and pepper, moistened with a little stock. That fills a beef heart; halve it for veal.
- Securing the cavityGreased paper or cloth tied on with kitchen twine still works, and foil works better. Skewers through the opening are the simplest fix; without something holding it shut the stuffing washes into the pan.
- Basting and turningTake the instruction literally. The exposed upper surface dries fast in an open pan, so turn the heart every 20-30 minutes and spoon liquid over it each time.
- The gravyEqual tablespoons of butter and flour cooked briefly, then the strained valve liquor whisked in (less than the original pint, after an hour's simmering), gives a thin gravy. Add the strained pan juices too, and reduce a little if you want body.
- Doneness and yieldHeart is done when a skewer meets no resistance, not at any particular internal temperature. A stuffed beef heart serves four to six, carved crosswise into rounds so each slice shows a ring of stuffing.
Heart belongs to the frugal end of the butcher's counter, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s took it for granted that a household would use it. The Dixie Cook Book treats it as one of the ordinary meat dishes, at a period when a whole beast was expected to be eaten. The technique here is the standard nineteenth-century answer to any tough cut: stuff it, cover it, and cook it slowly in a wet pan until the muscle fibres give way. The vocabulary is worth noting too. "Deaf ears" for the atria is old butchers' and household usage of uncertain origin, and it survives in print in books like this one long after it had faded from medical writing; the anatomical term auricle comes from the Latin auricula, "little ear". Stuffed heart persisted in British and American home cooking well into the twentieth century and is still cooked in Scottish, Peruvian and Central European kitchens, though in the United States it largely disappeared from the domestic repertoire once cheap cuts of muscle meat became reliably available.