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To Roast a Beef Heart

A roasted beef heart stuffed with a seasoned breadcrumb mixture, served with currant jelly, horseradish, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Marjoram and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

To Roast a Beef Heart

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Open the heart and remove the ventricles.

  2. Soak the heart in water until the blood is discharged.

  3. Parboil the heart until nearly tender.

Stuff and roast

  1. Prepare a force‑meat by mixing bread crumbs, chopped salt fat pork, pepper, sweet marjoram, parsley, coarse sea salt, and chopped onion.

  2. Stuff the heart with the force‑meat and secure the opening with small skewers.

  3. Lay thin slices of fat ham in a pan with hot water.

  4. Place the heart in the pan and baste with the gravy until done.

Serve

  1. Serve with currant jelly, grated horseradish, and lemon slices.

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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Marjoram + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + marjoramtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef heart
Forms the main body of the dish, cooked until tender and then stuffed.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the force‑meat a soft, cohesive body.
Salt fat pork
Adds fat that keeps the stuffing moist and rich during cooking.
Fat ham
Lines the pan, adding savoury fat and flavour to the gravy used for basting.

The step that matters

Parboil the heart until nearly tender. Parboiling partly cooks the dense muscle so it finishes evenly in the pan. Undercooking leaves it tough, while overcooking makes it dry before the stuffing is heated through.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, pork, pepper, marjoram, parsley, ham):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, pork, pepper, marjoram, parsley, ham. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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