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Beast's Heart Larded

A beef heart stuffed with forcemeat, larded with bacon, and served with a sauce of red wine, browning, lemon pickle, morels, and anchovy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and anchovy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,080 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Beast's Heart Larded

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the heart

  1. Stuff the heart with forcemeat.

  2. Lard the heart all over with bacon bits.

  3. Dust with flour and cover with paper to prevent drying.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until cooked through.

  2. Remove from oven and place on a dish.

  3. Skim off the fat and strain the gravy through a fine sieve.

  4. In a saucepan, combine the gravy with red wine, browning, lemon pickle, morels, and anchovy.

  5. Heat the sauce and pour it over the heart before serving.

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. Lemon + anchovytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + anchovytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,753 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Red wine + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together779 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Red wine + anchovytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanol (green, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that bastes the heart as it cooks.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the gravy sauce.
Morels
Contribute earthy, aromatic flavour to the sauce.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth, rounding out the sauce's flavour.

The step that matters

Covering the heart with paper. Covering the heart keeps the surface from drying out during the long oven bake, so the meat stays moist as it cooks through.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, red wine, anchovy):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, red wine, anchovy. 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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