Skip to main content
Main

Stuffed Hearts with Vegetables

A dish of calves' hearts stuffed with vegetables, baked in stock and served with boiled potatoes and hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 22 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stuffed Hearts with Vegetables

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the hearts

  1. Clean and wash the calves' hearts, stuff them, skewer into shape, and lard the upper surface.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and black pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in pork fat with one stalk celery, two sprigs parsley, four slices carrot, one slice turnip, a bay leaf, two cloves, and ten peppercorns.

  3. When the hearts are well browned, transfer to a deep earthenware dish, add 1½ cups brown stock, cover closely, and bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1½ hours, basting every 20 minutes.

Make the stuffing

  1. For the stuffing, mix the rolled crackers with the finely chopped fat salt pork, celery, parsley, and onion. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Remove to a hot platter and surround with carrots and turnips cut into thin strips, cooked until tender in boiling salted water, drained, and seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Calves' hearts
Form the main body of the dish, holding the stuffing while it cooks.
Pork fat
Browns the hearts and adds richness to the sautéing step.
Common crackers
Bind the stuffing and absorb moisture so it holds together.
Fat salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the stuffing, keeping it moist.
Brown stock
Provides moisture and savoury flavour for braising the hearts.

The step that matters

Browning the hearts before baking. Browning through sautéing creates flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale hearts placed in the covered dish will braise without developing that deep savoury colour and taste.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, pork, celery, parsley, carrot, turnip):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, pork, celery, parsley, carrot, turnip. 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipes