Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Boiled Tongue
Soak the tongue until it becomes soft. Put it into a stewpan with sufficient water, add a bouquet of herbs; as soon as it boils, skim and then simmer slowly until quite done, peel off the skin and garnish with parsley and lemon.
BRAINS (FRIED).
Prepare your brains with great care, taking out all the fiber. Place in cold water and soak for two hours.
Then throw them into boiling water with salt and a little vinegar, and let boil fifteen minutes; take out and throw them into cold water, drain well, and fry in hot lard (but not too hot). After the brains are fried put them on a white cloth, form a pyramid and dress with parsley. -Mrs.Granlees.
Two recipes run together here, and only the first of them belongs in a modern kitchen. The tongue is straightforward slow work; the fried brains are not something to attempt today, for the reason given at the end.
- Fresh or cured tongue"Soak the tongue until it becomes soft" points to a salt-cured or corned tongue, commonly sold at this period, which would have needed several hours, often overnight, in changes of cold water to draw out the brine. A fresh tongue needs no soaking at all, only rinsing.
- Size and timeA whole beef tongue runs 3-4 lb and needs 3 to 3½ hours at a bare simmer; veal or lamb tongues take about an hour. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance, not when the clock says so.
- Simmer, never boilThis is the hinge. Once it has come up and been skimmed, the water should barely move. A rolling boil tightens the muscle and gives you a dense, dry tongue that no amount of extra time will rescue.
- Peel while hotThe skin comes away in one sheet if you slit it lengthwise on the underside and pull it back the moment the tongue is out of the pot. Let it cool and it grips; a brief return to the hot liquid will loosen it again.
- Bouquet of herbsPeriod shorthand for parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, often with a leek green wrapped round. Add an onion, a carrot and a few peppercorns to the pot as well; unsalted fresh tongue also wants about a tablespoon of salt in the water.
- Yield and servingA beef tongue serves 8-10. Trim the gristly root end after peeling, then slice thin on a slight angle. Traditionally served hot with a caper or mustard sauce, or pressed under a weighted plate overnight and sliced cold.
- Why the brains are excludedBeef brain and spinal tissue are specified risk material because of BSE, and the misfolded prions involved are not destroyed by boiling, frying or any domestic cooking. Sale of cattle brain is restricted or banned in the UK, EU and elsewhere, and the recipe gives no indication of species or animal age. Anyone wanting to cook offal of this kind should work from current guidance and a current recipe.
Tongue was one of the great economies of the Victorian and Edwardian larder: cheap, sold both fresh and corned by every butcher, and capable of feeding a large table twice over, hot on the day and cold and pressed thereafter. Cured tongue in particular was a staple of the cold sideboard, the picnic hamper and the supper tray, which is why the instruction to soak comes first and without explanation ttongue arrived salted would have been familiar to most readers. The brains that follow show the same habit of mind. Household cookbooks of this period tended to assume the whole animal was food, and organ meats often appeared in the meat chapter beside roasts without apology; the elaborate presentation here, a pyramid on a white cloth dressed with parsley, recalls French restaurant practice, which treated cervelles as a delicacy rather than a thrift dish. The attribution to Mrs. Granlees is typical of the compiled community cookbook, where recipes were gathered from named contributors and printed much as they were submitted.