Affairs of the Heart - the Offal Truth

Number One Son has just asked for £6 to buy an ox heart. It’s for Art. GCSE that is, not St Martins Diploma, so he’s not going to staple it to a wall or marinate it in formaldehyde. Just paint its portrait.

Two points struck me. ‘What are you going to do with it afterwards?’

I was worried about decomposition: his art projects tend to go on for weeks.

‘ I suppose you want me to bring it home so you can cook it’ he said sardonically.

Which brings me to the other point. £6 for an ox heart? I can get a whole chicken for that, or a nice piece of sirloin.

‘Ox hearts are pretty big’ he pointed out.

‘And you only get one per ox’ I agreed.

When you think about it, the heart and tail are the only bits of an ox anyone eats. What a terrible waste of an animal.

I don’t like waste. Part of not being a vegetarian is not wasting the body of something killed for food. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall taught a group of initiates how to make three meals from one chicken, including soup.

‘Amazing’ said one ‘We usually just eat the breast and throw the rest away.’

Amazing.

The other day a TV presenter persuaded passersby to eat budget beefburgers, then told them the burgers were made from heart. His victims promptly spat them out, gagging.

The presenter then demanded the manufacturer come clean about the real content of these ‘so called 100% beef burgers’.

Hold on. A cow is 100% beef, and that includes the heart. What wrong with eating it? And what on earth do people think burgers are made of? Prime fillet?

The fillet of a cow is a pretty small strip along the spine – try feeling your own for meatiness and you’ll see what I mean. Rump, ribs, silverside and all the rest still account for only a modest percentage of a very big animal. The rest needs eating too.

My grandmother used to serve cow heel pie (it was appalling). My parents ate tripe (not bad, but cruel to apprentice butchers, who have to wash it). My father loved a stuffed sheep’s heart.

What would you stuff an ox heart with? A sheep’s heart, perhaps. Like those roasts at Tudor banquets, you could keep stuffing one heart inside another, from sheep to hare to partridge, right down to a teensy-weensy little wren heart right in the middle.

Ah, but who would eat the rest of the wren? Maybe wrenburgers could catch on.