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A Good Way to Dress a Midcalf

A dish of calf's heart stuffed with liver, lights, bacon, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,039 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the heart

  1. Fluff the calf's heart with forcemeat and place it in an earthen dish with a little water underneath.

  2. Cover the heart with butter and dredge it with flour.

Make the minced meat

  1. Boil half the liver and all the lights together for half an hour, then chop them finely.

  2. In a pan, combine the chopped liver and lights with gravy, lemon pickle, ketchup, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

  3. Thicken the mixture with butter rolled in flour.

  4. Pour the minced meat into the bottom of a serving dish.

  5. Fry the remaining liver in thin slices and bits of bacon, then place them over the minced meat.

Serve

  1. Set the heart in the middle and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,039 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together122,858 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,197 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Flour + ketchuptop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + livertop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 122,858 recipes mention both: they likely work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Calf's heart
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked whole as the centrepiece.
Liver
Provides rich, meaty flavour to both the minced filling and the fried topping.
Butter
Adds richness and helps thicken the sauce when rolled in flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and helps form a light coating on the heart.
Gravy
Supplies the liquid base and savoury depth of the minced meat.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky fat and crisp texture to the topping.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with butter rolled in flour. Adding flour-coated butter directly to hot liquid can clump; the butter and flour must be well worked in so the sauce thickens smoothly as the starch gelatinises with heat.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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