Boil a large fresh beef tongue in salted water until tender. Remove the tongue and lard it with thin strips of bacon; sprinkle with paprica; lay in a baking-pan; add 1 onion sliced thin and 1 cup of the water in which the tongue was cooked and pour over 1 pint of cream. Let bake in a moderate oven. Baste often with the sauce. Serve hot, and pour over the sauce; garnish with parsley.
A straightforward two-stage braise: the tongue is simmered until tender, then finished in the oven under cream. The original leaves out one step that every cook of the period took for granted.
- Peel the tongue while it is hotThe recipe never mentions it, but the thick outer skin must be slit and pulled off as soon as the tongue comes out of the pot. Once it cools the skin grips and will not come away cleanly.
- "Fresh" means uncuredTongue is also sold pickled or corned, which would make this dish far too salty under cream. Ask for a fresh beef tongue, about 3 to 4 lb; if only cured is available, soak it and skip the salt in the cooking water.
- How long the first boil takes"Until tender" is 2.5 to 3.5 hours at a bare simmer for a whole beef tongue. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance.
- Moderate oven350F. An hour, uncovered, basting every 15 minutes, is enough to glaze the outside and reduce the cream.
- LardingThreading strips of bacon through the meat with a larding needle is optional here, since the tongue is already fatty. Laying bacon strips over the top gives much the same result.
- PapricaThe period spelling of paprika. Use sweet Hungarian rather than the smoked Spanish sort, which did not figure in this cooking.
- The sauceA pint of cream plus a cup of stock will look thin going in and reduces to a pale sauce by the end. If it splits or stays loose, whisk in a little beurre manié off the heat rather than boiling it harder.
- YieldServes 6 to 8, carved in thin slices across the grain.
Boiled tongue was standing food across central Europe long before it was regional cooking, valued because it fed a household cheaply and sliced neatly cold. What marks this version as Austrian in the compiler's mind is the finish: paprika and a cream sauce, the flavour pair that spread out of the Hungarian half of the Habsburg empire into Viennese kitchens through the nineteenth century, where it turned up on everything from chicken to veal. Books of this kind — a dish a day, each labelled with a nation — were popular in American households around the turn of the twentieth century, offering a menu-planning gimmick and a mild sense of cosmopolitan travel, though the recipes themselves are usually American technique with one identifying seasoning attached. Tongue's near-disappearance from home cooking is recent; it was an ordinary butcher's item well into the twentieth century.