From the Living Museum
Coeur de Boeuf
- Origin
- France; known before 1200 under older names (Rouveau, Sanguine)
- Era
- Medieval (before 1200); present name from the 1700s
- Type / use
- Dual-purpose · Culinary
History & Stories
The name means ‘Ox Heart’; Leroy thought it came from the deep red colour and the roughly heart-shaped fruit, and found the apple in France before 1200 under the older names Rouveau and Sanguine 2. Dual-purpose with firm flesh. Unique mainly for its evocative name and status as a historic continental cooking / dessert apple.
Folklore & Name
French/Belgian; ‘Coeur de Boeuf’ = Ox Heart, referring to the large, sometimes heart-shaped fruit. Old European descriptive name.
Digging into the History
Below my own notes, here is what the old fruit books and today’s collections record about this apple, kept apart from the stories people tell.
What we know
The UK National Fruit Collection describes Coeur de Boeuf ("Ox Heart") as "an apple of French origin," "known since 1200s," with soft, greenish flesh veined with pink 1. The French pomologist André Leroy (1867) traced it much further back under older names. He wrote that its first names were Sanguine and Rouveau, Old French for "red," and found "pommes de Rouviau" in a 13th-century Paris street-cry poem. The name Cœur de Bœuf, he said, is far later: he knew of no pomology that used it before Duhamel in 1768. He thought it came from the deep red colour and the roughly heart-like shape of a fruit set on its eye 2 (our translations). It has gathered a long list of names across Europe, including Calville Coeur de Boeuf, Couchine de Provence, Claudine de Provence and the German Blut Apfel ("blood apple") 1.
The competing accounts
- UK National Fruit Collection 1: of French origin and "known since 1200s."
- André Leroy, 1867 2: known in France before 1200 under the names Sanguine and Rouveau; the name Cœur de Bœuf appears only in the 18th century.
- Some commentators, as Leroy reports 2: the same apple as Pliny's blood-red "Sanguine" apples of the 1st century AD.
Most likely (our judgment, not a certainty): a medieval French apple first known as Rouveau, renamed Cœur de Bœuf in the 1700s. Leroy's medieval evidence is documentary, and it agrees with the collection's date; the Roman identification is a guess based on a short description.
What we think: stories & traditions
A Roman apple? (theory) Pliny described large, spongy "blood-red" apples, and some 19th-century commentators identified them with this one. Leroy thought the description fitted, but he considered the medieval French record far better established than any Roman link 2.
Not a Calville. Leroy warned that several writers had confused Cœur de Bœuf with the red Calvilles, especially Calville Rouge d'Hiver, and that these are different apples 2.
Sources
- UK National Fruit Collection, "Coeur de Boeuf." www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/full2.php?id=1191&fruit=apple
- André Leroy, Dictionnaire de pomologie, Vol. 3 (Pommes, A–F) (Paris/Angers, 1867), "Cœur de Bœuf," pp. 226–228 (French). archive.org/details/dictionnairedepo03lero/mode/2up?q=Rouveau
Curious about Coeur de Boeuf?
Email us at drgoss@honeytreeorchard.com.