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Beast's Heart Larded

A cooked beast's heart larded with bacon, 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) · 9 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 beast's heart as desired.

  2. Lard the heart all over with bits of bacon.

  3. Dust the heart with flour and cover it with strong paper to prevent drying.

Bake and make the sauce

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

  2. Once baked, place the heart on a serving dish.

  3. Skim off the fat from the drippings.

  4. Strain the gravy through a fine sieve.

  5. In a saucepan, combine the strained gravy with red wine, browning, lemon pickle, morels, and chopped anchovy. Heat the sauce.

  6. Pour the sauce 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

Beast's heart
Forms the main body of the dish and gives its dense, meaty texture.
Bacon
Larded into the heart, it adds fat and moisture that keeps the lean meat from drying.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the gravy-based sauce.
Morels
Add an earthy, aromatic flavour to the sauce.
Anchovy
Adds savoury depth to the sauce, which it blends into rather than tasting fishy.

The step that matters

Cover the heart with strong paper before baking. Lean heart muscle dries out easily in the oven. The flour dusting and paper covering slow moisture loss, so the meat stays tender while 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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