Boil a beef tongue until tender; skin and slice thin. Heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. Add 1 chopped onion and 2 cloves of garlic minced fine. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown; add a little water, 1 cup of tomato-sauce, ½ cup chopped mushrooms, lemon-juice, salt and pepper to taste. Let boil. Add the sliced tongue, and ½ glass of sherry wine. Simmer ten minutes. Serve with baked macaroni.
A straightforward braise built on an already-cooked tongue, and the only difficult part is the tongue itself. Everything after that is a twenty-minute pan sauce.
- Cooking the tongueA fresh beef tongue of 3-4 lb needs 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer in salted water, ideally with an onion, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance; undercooked tongue stays stubbornly firm no matter how long it sits in the sauce.
- Skin it hotThis is the hinge. The rough outer skin peels off in sheets while the tongue is still steaming and welds itself back on as it cools. Lift it out, run it briefly under cold water so you can handle it, then slit the skin lengthwise and strip it before trimming the gristle and small bones at the root end.
- Cured versus freshTongue is sold both fresh and brine-cured (pickled); the cured sort comes out distinctly salty and pink. If that is what you have, soak it a few hours in cold water first and hold back the salt in the sauce. The recipe says only 'a beef tongue' and gives no sign of a cured one.
- "½ glass of sherry"An imprecise measure even by the standards of its day. A wineglass of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so half a glass reads as roughly 1 fluid ounce, or 2 tablespoons. Use a dry amontillado or fino rather than a sweet cream sherry.
- Tomato-sauceIn a book of this vintage this means a plain cooked tomato sauce or purée, not a seasoned pasta sauce and certainly not ketchup. A cup of canned tomato purée or crushed tomatoes reduced slightly is the right substitute.
- Brown the flour properlyThe roux wants to go a genuine nut-brown before liquid goes in, which takes several minutes of steady stirring. Add the garlic after the onion has softened, or it will scorch and turn bitter in the browning flour.
- Ten minutes is rightThe tongue is already fully cooked, so the final simmer is only to warm the slices and let them take up the sauce. Longer will not improve it and will start to dry the meat out.
- YieldA 3-4 lb tongue slices to serve six to eight generously. Leftover sliced tongue in its sauce reheats well the next day and is also good cold in sandwiches.
Tongue was everyday meat for most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth — cheap, plentiful at any butcher, and a fixture of both the boarding-house table and the cold buffet. What makes this version "Italian" in the author's mind is the assembly of garlic, tomato and mushrooms with a browned roux, the shorthand an American cookbook of the period used to signal southern Europe, and the baked macaroni served alongside completes the picture. The dish belongs to the broad family of tongue braises found across Europe — the Italian lingua in umido, the French langue de bœuf sauce piquante — in which a long-boiled tongue is sliced and finished in a sharp, acidic sauce, here with lemon juice and sherry doing the sharpening. The book's conceit of a dish a day from a different nation was a popular format in this period, when household cooks were being encouraged to look beyond a narrow Anglo-American repertoire; the results tell you rather more about American ideas of foreign cooking than about the countries named.