ANCESTRAL EATING: Heart

This one's a favourite of mine and many others. Whether cooked or raw, heart is delicious and packed full of nutrition

Welcome back to ANCESTRAL EATING with the Raw Egg Nationalist. This is my guide to eating like our ancestors for optimal health. In this edition I’ll be discussing the benefits of eating heart and providing you with some great recipes to make sure you start eating and enjoying it as soon as possible.

If you missed the earlier parts of this series, here’s the introduction; the article on liver; the article on kidney; and the article on blood, which really divided opinion. Once again, let me remind you that you don’t have to eat all or even any of these foods. I’m just trying to inform you of the benefits of a nose-to-tail diet and to give you the resources to decide if and in what manner you’d like to try eating that way.

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Although, as with all organ meat, heart isn’t for the squeamish, it has the benefit of being extremely tasty and having a nice texture, somewhat like a piece of brisket. The heart is a hard-working muscle — if it ever stops working, even for a short period of time, you’re dead — which means it lends itself to slow braising, for instance in an Italian ragu, but you can also cook it quickly if you slice it thinly. You can even eat it raw, which is how I prefer it, tartare-style. I’ll provide a recipe for heart tartare at the end, and trust me, it’s absolutely delicious. I have it once a week and I spend the rest of the week looking forward to it.

If there’s a food guaranteed to get my cat up off the bed and down into the kitchen in a flash, it’s cow heart. I have a delivery of offal, raw milk and cheeses from a wonderful farm shop every week, including a half a cow’s heart (they’re big), and as soon as I open the packaging, down comes the cat to beg for some slices. She knows what’s good for her.

It’s a shame we don’t: heart is not something you see on restaurant menus, despite being delicious and very nutritious, and it’s not something you even see in butchers’ shops these days either. I consider my local butchers to be unusually good, with a wide range of cuts and types of meats and a fine selection of local artisanal products, but if I want heart, they have to order it in for me, in bulk. The same goes for tripe, which I’ll cover a little later down the road.

I started eating heart seriously after I got COVID, on the principle of like-heals-like. This is a principle observed throughout the world of traditional food and medicine. If you’ve got a problem with a part of your body, that’s what you need to consume. Liver problems? Eat some liver. Kidney problems? Kidney. Testicles giving you a hard time? You get the idea. The dreaded Coof is known to cause heart problems (myocarditis and pericarditis in particular) and so, in order to ward off the possibility of damage to the ol’ ticker, I decided to start eating heart once a week. What a good idea that was.