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Love in Disguise
Some well-seasoned forcemeat Boiled vermicelli Brown gravy Wash and dry a calf's heart, cover it with a layer of well-seasoned forcemeat, and steam until almost ready. Finish the cooking by baking, cover with boiled vermicelli, and serve with a rich brown gravy. Sometimes the heart is stuffed, covered with pastry and baked in a hot oven.
1 calf's heart. To make the forcemeat, put through the food chopper one-half pound of lean pork, and onefourth pound of lean meat, then add one cupful of bread-crumbs, salt, pepper and paprika to taste, grated rind of one lemon, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, two well-beaten eggs and mix together.
A Victorian-era supper dish that dresses an offal cut in forcemeat and pasta so it stops looking like what it is. Nothing in it is difficult, but the timings and one ingredient list need translating.
- The hinge: cook the heart slowly, then finish hotHeart is dense working muscle with very little fat, and it turns to rubber if it is cooked fast. The steaming stage should be long and gentle — a 1 to 1.5 lb calf's heart wants roughly 1.5 to 2 hours over simmering water — with the oven used only to set and colour the forcemeat crust.
- Buying the heartCalf's heart is a butcher order rather than a supermarket item; beef heart is the usual substitute and is two to three times larger, so scale the forcemeat accordingly. Trim the hard valves, arteries and surface fat, and rinse the chambers thoroughly before drying.
- "One-fourth pound of lean meat"The original does not say which meat. Veal is a likely reading alongside the lean pork, but the book does not specify; lean beef or the trimmings from the heart itself both work. Read it as a quarter pound of any lean red meat rather than a fixed rule.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked chopper of the period gave a coarse mince. A meat grinder on the coarse plate is closest; a food processor pulsed briefly will do, but do not run it to a paste or the forcemeat goes dense.
- Oven temperaturesFor the baked finish, 375F is enough to firm and brown the forcemeat. The pastry-wrapped variation calls for a "hot oven," usually taken as somewhere around 400 to 450F.
- Cook the forcemeat throughThe stuffing contains raw pork and raw egg wrapped around an already-cooked interior, so the oven stage is the only thing cooking it. Take the forcemeat layer to 160F on a probe before serving.
- The vermicelliThis is boiled pasta laid over the finished heart as a covering, not a baked topping. Drain it well and toss it in a little of the gravy or butter so it does not dry out under the oven's residual heat.
- Gravy and yield"Rich brown gravy" means a roux-thickened brown stock or the pan drippings let down with stock; make it separately, as the heart yields little. A calf's heart with its forcemeat serves three to four; a beef heart, six to eight.
- SlicingCarve across the grain in thin slices. Cut with the grain and even a properly cooked heart eats stringy.
The name is an English joke of long standing: a stuffed heart, hidden under forcemeat or pastry so the diner cannot tell what is on the plate, is love in disguise. Versions appear in British and American household books through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, and the pun is often said to rest on the older sense of a "disguised" dish — one deliberately dressed to conceal a humble or unfashionable ingredient. That was the point. Heart was cheap, plentiful and mistrusted by squeamish eaters, and a cook working to a budget had every reason to make it arrive at the table looking like a roast.