Valley of the Trolley Dollies

“Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.  He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes.  Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”
–James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

In this age of supermarket meats, with the disappearance of the local butcher, we end up eating the meat – the cuts, the types, the parts – that the monolith megamarts want to sell us; the stuff that’s easily packaged, transported, stored; the meat that can be most easily sold to the largest mass market. Anything that’s oddly shaped, a little too delicate for slam-bam-refrigerated truck-to-warehouse-to-cold shelf gets dropped, and, slowly but surely, vanishes from the repertoire.

I’m reminded of this because my parents are visiting. They’ve always visited “The Butcher.” Sometimes – usually – daily. My Uncle was the butcher when I was a kid, and I can still remember the sawdust floors, the hanging carcases – marbled in fat – so removed from actual animals and the glistening, dark scarlet to palest pink spread of product in the windows.

And hearts. A true comfort food, and one which you don’t ever see at supermarkets. Sheeps hearts – a little bigger than, and almost the same shape as, your fist.

A cross section would look like one of a capsicum pepper; four chambers surrounded and divided by a thin wall of meat. Not a huge amount of meat by any accounts, but so good when roasted long and slow in the oven.

The gentle heat pulls out the fat inherent in the meat (a fatty heart? Thank god humanity doesn’t appear to be the only creature open to coronary disease). It reaches the surface, and cooks, then scorches, then caramelises, making a red unctuous and almost impossibly savoury shell, inside of which is the velvet smooth, deliciously creamy meat, then the four ventricles, filled with savoury air.

Of course, the empty space can be stuffed; I’ve often seen them this way (although my mother never stuffed hearts when we had them). Rice – a mixture of white and wild – is good, often mixed with minutely chopped red and green peppers. Or, for a nice Arabic feel, try couscous, made up using a good stock or bouillon, then lightly fried with toasted and smashed coriander seeds, then speckled with teeny-tiny jewels of reconstituted dried apricots, almost preternaturally green slivers of smashed up pistachios, a little dusting of cinnamon, and perhaps a finely diced red chilli pepper or two.

I’ve always wondered whether the luxury could be upped by filling the parcel with a rich pate, but suspect that that much cream and fat would result in a messy – and possibly too rich – concoction.