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Baked Calf's Heart
(England.) This is a very old dish and called usually, "Love in Disguise." Wash the heart well, wipe it, and fill it with a forcemeat of chopped veal, breadcrumbs, herbs, onion, seasoning, and yolk of egg. Tie it in oiled paper and bake it for 1 1/2 hours, basting often. Take off the paper, sprinkle it with flour, and let it brown. Serve it in slices, with a puree of spinach, or tomatoes, or mashed potato.
A straightforward stuffed offal roast, but the original assumes you know both the oven setting and how a heart behaves. Two things need attention: the temperature, and the fact that the forcemeat contains raw veal.
- Oven temperatureNo setting is given, and the recipe uses no oven-heat term at all, so nothing here can be translated directly. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a stuffed joint of this kind; higher and the lean muscle tightens and dries before the centre is done.
- The forcemeat is raw meatChopped veal packed inside a dense heart is the slowest part of the dish to heat. Check the centre of the stuffing rather than the meat around it; it wants 165F. If the heart is done and the stuffing is not, the timing was too short, not the recipe wrong.
- Preparing the heartA calf's heart needs more than washing. Cut away the surface fat, open the chambers, snip out the coarse tendon-like valve tissue and any clotted blood, then rinse and soak in cold salted water for an hour. Butchers often sell hearts already split, which makes stuffing easier but means you tie rather than fill.
- Oiled paperOiled paper was the period's basting jacket. Buttered parchment tied with kitchen string does the same job; foil works but traps steam, so open it for the final browning either way.
- Basting and browningHeart has almost no internal fat, so the frequent basting is not optional. Melted butter or dripping in the pan, spooned over every twenty minutes. The flour dusting at the end sets into a thin brown crust under a hotter oven or a few minutes under the broiler.
- Forcemeat proportionsFor a heart of about 1 1/2 lb, roughly 6 oz chopped veal, a cup of fresh breadcrumbs, one small onion softened in butter, a tablespoon of chopped parsley and thyme, one egg yolk, salt and pepper. Do not pack it tight; it swells.
- Slicing and yieldThe recipe says only to serve it in slices; cut them thin and across the grain or it eats tough. Reckon on one calf's heart with its stuffing serving three, or four alongside the spinach or potato puree.
The English name Love in Disguise is attested in English cookery writing, and the name is often explained by what the recipe does: the heart, traditionally taken as the organ of affection, is hidden under a coat of forcemeat and paper so that nothing on the plate declares what it is. Stuffed heart belongs to the long tradition of English farmhouse and household cooking that treated offal as ordinary meat rather than a curiosity, and calf's heart in particular was cheap, lean and large enough to serve a family. It appears here tagged "(England.)", with the compiler's note that it is "a very old dish".