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To Bake a Heart and Liver
Soak the liver an hour in cold water that has been well salted. Boil the heart in salted water until tender. Then put them in the baking pan together, and dredge with flour. Add a spoonful of butter and a sprinkle of pepper to the water in which the heart boiled, and pour into the pan with the heart and liver. Baste frequently and bake an hour. A calf or beef tongue can be boiled and baked in the same manner as a heart. The skin must be removed from the tongue when boiled, before it is prepared for baking.
A pot-roast method for the two organ meats most often left over from butchering. The original assumes you know how to run an oven; it never gives a temperature, and it treats liver and heart as if they cook alike, which they do not.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a pan of braising meat of this kind a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Note the recipe leaves the pan open, since it calls for frequent basting; much hotter and the shallow cooking liquid will boil away before the hour is up.
- Liver and heart cook at different ratesThis is the hinge. Heart is dense muscle that needs the preliminary boil and takes the full hour happily. Liver is done in 15-20 minutes and turns grainy and metallic past that, so add it to the pan for the last stretch rather than at the start.
- Boiling the heartTrim out the valves, vessels and any clotted blood inside the chambers first. Simmer rather than hard-boil, 1½ to 2 hours for a beef heart, 45-60 minutes for a calf heart, until a skewer goes in with light resistance.
- The salted soakAn hour in well-salted cold water was held to draw out blood and soften the strong flavour of liver, and it is still commonly done. Use about a tablespoon of salt to a quart, and pat the liver dry before flouring or it will not brown.
- "A spoonful of butter"Read this as a rounded tablespoon. Combined with the flour dredge and the heart's cooking water, it is what thickens into gravy in the pan; the basting is what keeps the flour from setting into a dry crust.
- Peeling the tongueThe instruction to skin the boiled tongue is not optional, and it must be done while the tongue is still hot. Once it cools the skin grips and comes away in shreds.
- YieldA beef heart with liver serves six to eight; a calf heart, three or four. Slice the heart across the grain, thin, and spoon the pan liquid over it.
Baking a heart and liver together belongs to the whole-animal economy of the nineteenth-century household kitchen: the organs spoiled fastest and so were eaten first, well before the roasts and the cured cuts. The recipe itself names calf and beef, which is where most readers would have met the method. Heart is lean working muscle and needs the long moist cooking this recipe gives it, while liver needs almost none; the pairing here is more likely a matter of what arrived at the kitchen door on the same day than of any culinary affinity. Recipes of this type thinned out through the twentieth century as butchering moved off the household premises and offal stopped appearing unbidden in the domestic kitchen.