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Escalloped Tongue
Chop the tongue when cold, and to one pint add one teaspoonful chopped parsley, one of salt, one of capers, one of bread crumbs ; three tablespoonfuls of butter. Mix tongue and seasoning well together, butter your dish, cover the bottom with bread crumbs, and then put the meat on it, pouring over this one-half cup of stock and one tablespoonful of onion juice. Sprinkle a few bread crumbs on the top, with bits of butter, and bake fifteen or twenty minutes.
A leftovers dish built on cooked tongue, and it assumes you already have a boiled tongue sitting in the larder. The recipe gives no oven temperature, so the numbers below fill the gap.
- Start with cooked tongueThe recipe presumes a tongue already simmered until tender and left to go cold; beef or veal would be the usual choice. Raw tongue generally needs something like 2.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer before it will peel and chop, and it is easier to chop once thoroughly cold.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Fifteen to twenty minutes is only enough to heat through and brown the crumbs, so use a moderately hot oven, 375-400F, in a shallow dish.
- A pint of chopped tongueThat is a volume measure, not a weight: 2 cups, which will come to somewhere around a pound of chopped cooked meat depending on how finely it is cut. A whole beef tongue yields more than this, so scale up or plan on making it twice.
- Onion juiceAn old kitchen staple, made by halving an onion and scraping the cut face against a grater or pressing it through cloth. A tablespoon is roughly what half a medium onion will give, though yields vary; grated onion with its liquid does the same job.
- StockHalf a cup of the tongue's own cooking liquid is the obvious choice. If the tongue was pickled or corned the liquid will be salty, so taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt called for.
- CapersA teaspoon of capers in a pint of meat is a light touch. Drain and chop them; their acidity is doing the work of cutting the fat, and doubling the amount is no hardship.
- ButterThree tablespoons mixed into the meat plus more dotted on top is generous by modern habit, but tongue reheats dry without it. Do not cut it back much.
- YieldNo yield is given. A pint of meat would stretch to about four servings with potatoes, or more as part of a larger meal. Best eaten straight from the dish while the crumb top is crisp.
Escalloped dishes are one of the workhorses of nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookery: chopped cooked food, crumbs above and below, a little liquid, a short bake. The technique gave leftovers a second life at a time when tongue was ordinary meat rather than a curiosity, and it appears throughout the meat chapters of books of this period pickled, smoked, boiled, jellied and potted -- a boiled tongue could be sliced cold for the table and the remainder chopped for something like this. Caper sauce was a standard English accompaniment to boiled meats, and the capers and parsley here may be an echo of that, with the seasoning folded into the meat rather than poured over it.