Cook a fresh tongue until tender; skin and slice thin. Put a large spoonful of butter in a saucepan; add a chopped onion; let brown. Then stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour; add 2 cups of the water in which the tongue was cooked, a pinch of nutmeg and cinnamon. Let boil with the juice of 1 lemon, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar and 1 tablespoonful of sugar. Add the sliced tongue and simmer ten minutes. Serve hot or cold.
A straightforward sweet-sour braise that depends entirely on cooking the tongue properly before the sauce is ever made. The original assumes you know how long that takes.
- "Fresh" tongueFresh means uncured — not the pink brined or smoked tongue sold at delicatessens, which would fight the lemon and sugar. A whole beef tongue runs 3 to 4 lb; veal tongues are smaller and cook faster.
- The first cookingSimmer the tongue in salted water with an onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns for 2½ to 3½ hours, until a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance. Undercooked tongue is rubbery and no amount of simmering in sauce will fix it.
- SkinningPeel the rough outer skin off while the tongue is still hot enough to handle with a cloth — it lifts away in sheets. Once cold it clings and has to be cut off, wasting meat.
- Save the brothThe two cups of cooking liquid are the body of the sauce, so do not drain the pot down the sink. Skim the fat and taste it for salt before adding, since a heavily salted broth plus reduction can turn the sauce sharp.
- "A large spoonful of butter"Read this as a generous 2 tablespoons. With 1 tablespoon of flour to 2 cups of liquid the sauce stays deliberately thin — closer to a gravy than a coating sauce. Double the roux if you want it to cling to the slices.
- Balancing the sourLemon juice, 2 tablespoons vinegar and 1 tablespoon sugar is the whole point of the dish, but vinegar strength varies. Add the vinegar in stages and taste; the finish should be tart with the sugar just behind it, not candied.
- The ten minutesThe tongue is already cooked, so the final simmer is only to warm the slices and let them take up the sauce. Longer will not improve it, and boiling hard can make the butter separate out and leave the sauce looking greasy.
- Yield and servingA 3 to 4 lb tongue serves 6 to 8. Served cold, the sauce sets lightly from the gelatin in the broth, which is how it is often eaten as a first course or supper dish.
Sweet-sour tongue in a spiced sauce with raisins, sharpened with lemon, is a fixture of Polish and Polish-Jewish cooking, where it is generally traced to the older European taste for pairing boiled meats with sour-sweet sauces seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg " a habit that survived in Central and Eastern Europe long after Western kitchens moved on. Books of this type, apparently aimed at household cooks, offered one dish a day from a different country as a novelty and a small geography lesson, which is why the recipe carries no context beyond the label "Polish." Tongue itself needed no introduction to the period's cooks: it was cheap, sold whole at any butcher, and appears constantly in household manuals boiled, pressed, potted or jellied. Its near-disappearance from the everyday table looks to be a change in squeamishness rather than in supply.