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Beef's Heart
Marion Harland.
Wash the heart well, and cut into squares half an inch long. Stew them for ten minutes in enough water to cover them. Salt the water slightly to draw out the blood, and throw it away as it rises in scum to the top. Take out the meat, strain the liquor, and return the chopped heart to it, with a sliced onion, a great spoonful of catsup, some parsley, a head of celery chopped fine, and cayenne pepper, with a large lump of butter. Stew until the meat is very tender, when add a tablespoonful of browned flour to thicken. Boil up once, and serve.
A frugal stew of diced beef heart, blanched to clear the blood and then simmered with aromatics. The method is sound; only the timings and a few of the measures need translating.
- The hinge: cook it long enoughHeart is dense working muscle, and the ten-minute blanch here is only to clean it. The tenderness comes from the second stew; expect an hour or more at a bare simmer for half-inch dice, testing as you go. Taken off too early it will still be chewy.
- Trimming, which the recipe assumesA whole beef heart weighs roughly 3 to 5 lb and carries tough surface sinew, hard fat and the valve tissue inside the chambers. All of it should come off before dicing; what remains is lean, close-grained red meat.
- "Squares half an inch long"Half-inch dice. Cut across the grain where you can, since the muscle fibres in heart run in long, distinct bundles.
- "A great spoonful of catsup"Roughly a heaped tablespoon. In a nineteenth-century American kitchen catsup could mean mushroom, walnut or tomato ketchup, generally thinner and less sweet than modern bottled tomato sauce. A tablespoon of mushroom ketchup or a teaspoon of Worcestershire plus a spoon of tomato paste is closer in spirit.
- "A head of celery"A whole bunch, not a single rib. Two or three ribs with their leaves is about right for a modern head.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan or a slow oven until it is the colour of cinnamon. It was kept ready in a jar. It thickens less than raw flour, so a tablespoon into this quantity of liquor gives a light gravy rather than a heavy one; whisk it with a little cold water first to avoid lumps.
- "A large lump of butter"Two tablespoons or so. It is going in at the start of a long stew, so it is enriching the broth rather than finishing the sauce.
- YieldOne heart makes roughly four to six servings. Serve over mashed potato or toast.
Marion Harland was the pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, a Virginia-born novelist whose Common Sense in the Household (1871) made her one of the most widely read domestic authorities in America; compiled books like this one borrowed her recipes freely, often with nothing but her name attached. Beef heart belonged to the category Victorian writers called the cheap or neglected pieces. The blanch-and-skim opening is characteristic of the period's handling of any bloody cut. Heart is worth the trouble on its own terms: it is muscle rather than glandular organ, so it eats like a firm, faintly mineral beef rather than like liver or kidney.