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To Roast a Beef Heart

Roasted beef heart stuffed with veal forcemeat, basted in butter, served hot with optional brown gravy or currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and veal are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,784 recipes. Both carry 2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, green. The science ↓

To Roast a Beef Heart

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash and soak the beef heart thoroughly.

  2. Cut away the lobes and fill the cavities with veal forcemeat.

  3. Secure the heart with a needle and coarse thread.

Roast and serve

  1. Roast the heart at a good fire (400°F / 200°C) for 1.5 hours, basting it frequently with butter.

  2. Pour melted butter over the heart after dishing it up.

  3. Serve hot, optionally with brown gravy or currant jelly.

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. Beef + vealtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  2. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Veal + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,381 recipes

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

  5. Beef + curranttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,464 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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, a dense muscle that becomes tender with slow roasting.
Veal forcemeat
Fills the cavities with a moist, seasoned stuffing that keeps the lean heart from drying out.
Butter
Basting adds fat and moisture to the surface, promoting browning and a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Basting the heart during roasting. Lean heart muscle dries out easily over 1.5 hours in a hot oven. Frequent basting with butter keeps the surface moist and helps it brown evenly.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, veal, butter):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, veal, butter. 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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