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A California Dish
One fresh tongue.
One bottle of olives.
Two dozen large bright red peppers.
Squeeze the juice of two large lemons in a teacup and fill up with vinegar, one teaspoonful of powdered summer savory, two tablespoonfuls of finely-chopped onion and olive oil. Dissolve half teacupful of salt in enough boiling water to cover the tongues and cook until done; skin and cut into very thin slices. Cut open the peppers the long way; take out every seed and vein; cut off the stem end; drop the skins into an agate kettle of boiling water and keep at boiling heat for two hours; it must not even simmer or the flaver will be lost. Skim into a chopping bowl and be sure to press out all the water. Chop to a pulp and pass through a sieve; then add oil and vinegar by spoonful; cut the olives off the stones and put in last. Dip each slice of tongue in the sauce and pile in a dish, rather deep, and pour over the remaining sauce. Serve next day. This is good with roast turkey, cold ham or fried oysters.
A cold sliced tongue dressed in a red-pepper relish, written for a cook who already knew how to boil a tongue. The measurements are loose in places and the pepper instruction contradicts itself, so a few decisions have to be made before starting.
- The hinge: the peppersEverything else is assembly. The peppers are boiled, drained hard, chopped to a pulp and sieved, and if the water is not pressed out the sauce will be thin and will not cling to the tongue. Squeeze the cooked skins in a towel rather than trusting a spoon.
- "Boiling heat" versus simmerThe direction to hold at a full boil for two hours and never let it drop to a simmer runs against every modern instinct, and two hours is far longer than fresh peppers need to collapse. Twenty to thirty minutes at a steady boil gives a pulp that sieves easily; the flavour claim for the longer time is the author's, not a rule.
- What "large bright red peppers" meansIn a turn-of-the-century California context these are most likely fresh ripe sweet peppers or mild pimientos rather than hot chiles; taking out the seeds and veins, as the recipe directs, removes what heat there is. Two dozen is several pounds of peppers; substitute drained jarred pimientos if fresh red ones are pale and thick-walled.
- A teacupPeriod cookbooks reckon a teacup at anywhere from a gill (4 oz) to about 3/4 cup (6 oz); take it as roughly 6 oz here, so the lemon juice and vinegar together come to about 6 oz and the half teacupful of salt is about 3 oz by volume, dissolved in a boiling liquid that is discarded.
- Unmeasured oilThe olive oil has no quantity at all. Start with 1/2 cup added spoonful by spoonful, as directed, and stop when the sauce is thick enough to coat a slice without running off.
- Agate kettleAgate ware is speckled enamelled steel. The point is a non-reactive pan: acid and long-cooked peppers will pick up metal from bare aluminium or cast iron. Enamel or stainless is the equivalent.
- The tongueA fresh (uncured) beef tongue of 2 to 4 lb needs roughly 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, until a skewer slides in with no resistance. Peel the skin while it is still hot, and slice thinner across the grain than seems reasonable.
- "Serve next day"The overnight rest is what lets the sauce penetrate the slices, but it belongs in the refrigerator, tightly covered he a dressed cooked meat left at room temperature overnight is exactly the wrong thing. It keeps three or four days cold.
- YieldA 2 to 3 lb tongue with this quantity of sauce serves eight to ten as a cold relish or side, which is how the last line frames it he alongside turkey, ham or fried oysters rather than as the centre of the meal.
The title is doing the work of an explanation: to a national readership, a dish built on quantities of sweet red peppers, olives, olive oil and lemon was recognisably Californian, and the book offers it as a novelty rather than a staple. Commercial olive growing in California grew out of the Spanish mission plantings, which is why a "bottle of olives" could be assumed in a general household cookbook at all. The technique underneath is older and broadly European he boiled tongue sliced cold and served under a sharp oil-and-vinegar sauce, a standard way of stretching a cheap cut into a company dish he with the pepper pulp standing in for the mustards and horseradishes an eastern cook would have reached for. The result sits somewhere between a vinaigrette and what a later generation would call a salsa, and the pairing suggestions at the end place it firmly on the cold buffet table.