Boil a calf's tongue in salted water until tender; skin and slice thin. Then heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add 1 chopped onion; stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown; add 2 cups of the water in which the tongue was cooked, ¼ cup of seeded raisins, a few cloves, 1 bay-leaf, ¼ cup of vinegar, and ½ teaspoonful of paprica. Let all boil well; then add the sliced tongue. Let simmer ten minutes. Serve hot or cold.
A sweet-sour braised tongue in the raisin-and-vinegar style found across Central and Eastern European Jewish cooking. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings the original leaves out are the ones that matter.
- Boiling timeA calf's tongue, usually somewhere between 1½ and 3 lb, needs roughly 1½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance; undercooked tongue is unpleasantly firm and will not skin.
- Skin it hotThe tough outer membrane peels away cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming. Lift it out, let it sit a minute, slit the skin lengthwise and pull. Once cold it grips and you will end up carving it off.
- Save the cooking liquidThe recipe calls for 2 cups of it, so do not drain it away. Skim the fat and taste before using it; if the salting was heavy, cut it with plain water or the finished sauce will be too salty once reduced.
- Butter and kashrutDespite the heading, butter with meat is not kosher. Households keeping the laws of kashrut would have used schmaltz (rendered chicken or goose fat), margarine or oil, and any of the three works as well here. The title in this book signals a national style, not a certified kitchen.
- "Paprica"Sweet paprika; the recipe does not specify a type. Half a teaspoon in two cups of sauce is for colour and warmth rather than heat; hot paprika will unbalance the raisin-vinegar sweetness.
- The roux"Stir in flour until brown" means browning the flour with the onion to a nut-brown colour, which will take several minutes over medium heat. Add the stock off the heat and whisk to avoid lumps, then return it to a simmer to thicken.
- Cloves"A few" means three or four whole cloves for two cups of liquid. Any more and they take over. Fish them and the bay leaf out before serving.
- Sweet-sour balanceA quarter cup of vinegar is assertive. Add half, simmer, then taste and finish with the rest; the recipe does not say which vinegar, and a cider or wine vinegar will taste rounder here than a distilled white.
- Yield and servingA calf's tongue with this sauce serves four to six. Hot, it wants potatoes or noodles; cold, the sauce sets slightly and it makes good sliced deli-style eating on rye.
Sweet-and-sour tongue with raisins is one of the most persistent dishes in the Ashkenazi repertoire, appearing in German, Polish and Hungarian Jewish kitchens, and it is close kin to the sweet-sour braises applied to brisket and pot roast. The combination of vinegar, dried fruit and browned onion is generally traced to medieval European cooking, where sugar or fruit against acid was standard for meat sauces long before it became a specifically Jewish marker; it survived in Jewish cooking well after the wider European taste for it faded. Tongue itself was an economical cut that repaid slow cooking, and it was a staple of the Jewish delicatessen trade in American cities at the time this book was compiled. That the compiler labelled the dish "Jewish" and then called for butter shows how these round-the-world recipe calendars worked: each day borrowed a national flavour, with the actual dietary rules of the cuisine left at the door.