Home › A Calendar of Dinners › March 4
March 4
Menu: Spanish Soup; Baked Stuffed Heart; Mashed Potatoes Fried Beets; Red Cabbage Salad; Orange Pudding; Coffee; . Baked Stuffed Heart-Take an ox heart and season it inside with salt and pepper, and fill it quite full of herb forcemeat; fasten it up with a needle and string, rub the heart over well with melted Crisco and fold it up in a well Criscoed paper; tie it up, put heart in a baking tin in the oven, keeping it well basted with melted Crisco, then remove the paper and dish upon a hot dish, and serve round it a good brown sauce or tomato sauce or brown caper sauce, and garnish with olive potatoes. This should be served while hot.
A whole ox heart is a large, lean, very dense muscle, and this recipe gives neither a temperature nor a time. Both matter more here than anything else in the method.
- The hinge: low and slowHeart is working muscle full of connective tissue, and fast roasting turns it grey and rubbery. Treat it as a braise-roast at 300-325F for around 3 hours for a 3-4 lb heart, keeping it covered and moist the whole way; it is done when a skewer meets no resistance.
- "An ox heart"A full beef heart runs 3-5 lb and will not fit most modern roasting tins whole. Butchers today often sell heart halved or trimmed; two halves stuffed and tied together, or a single 2 lb portion with the stuffing packed into the ventricles, is the practical substitute.
- Trimming, which the recipe assumesCut away the hard valve tissue, surface sinew and any clotted blood inside the chambers, then rinse well. Some period recipes direct soaking or thorough washing of the heart beforehand to draw out remaining blood.
- Criscoed paperThis is greased kitchen paper tied round the joint to stop the surface drying, a forerunner of later foil-covered roasting. Buttered or oiled parchment, or simply foil, does the same job; remove it for the last 20 minutes if you want colour.
- CriscoHydrogenated cottonseed shortening, sold then as a novelty replacement for lard. Lard, beef dripping or a neutral oil all work in the basting and on the paper; nothing in the method depends on the shortening itself.
- Herb forcemeatIn this period that means fresh breadcrumbs bound with suet or shortening and egg, seasoned with parsley, thyme, marjoram, onion, salt and pepper. Allow roughly 2 cups of stuffing for a whole heart, and pack it loosely so it can swell.
- Olive potatoesA garnish of potatoes cut with a small scoop or turned to olive shapes, then boiled or roasted. Any small even potato does the same duty on the platter.
- Carving and yieldA whole stuffed heart serves 6 to 8. Let it rest 10 minutes, then carve across the grain in thin slices; thick slices eat tough no matter how long it cooked.
The Story of Crisco (Procter & Gamble, first issued 1913, with recipes credited to Marion Harris Neil) was written to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for lard and butter everywhere in the kitchen, which is why the word appears three times in a recipe that scarcely needs fat at all. A companion Crisco publication, the "Calendar of Dinners," laid out a dish for every day of the year, and stuffed heart belongs to the thrifty end of that calendar: heart was one of the cheapest cuts on the block, and stuffing, wrapping and long baking were the standard treatment for lean offal in British and American household cookery through the nineteenth century. The technique of tying a joint in greased paper predates foil by decades and did exactly the same work, and the olive-shaped potato garnish is a leftover of the French service that respectable American cookbooks of the 1910s still gestured toward.