Boil a beef tongue until tender; take off the outer skin. Then rub with butter and the beaten yolk of an egg; put in a baking-dish. Add ½ cup of the water in which the tongue was cooked, ½ glass of wine and ½ can of mushrooms. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and let bake until brown. Serve garnished with the mushrooms.
A two-stage dish: a long simmer to tenderize, then a short bake to glaze and brown. The original assumes you know how to handle a whole tongue and gives no oven temperature, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: peel while hotThe outer skin slips off cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming; once it cools it grips and you end up carving it away in strips. Lift it from the liquid, let it sit a minute or two until you can handle it, then slit the skin lengthwise and pull. Trim the gristle, small bones and fat at the root end as well.
- Buy the right tongueA fresh beef tongue runs 2.5-4 lb and serves six to eight. Butchers also sell cured or pickled tongue, which is already brined and will make the finished dish very salty with the added seasoning; if you use one, soak it and skip the extra salt.
- Simmering time"Until tender" means roughly 3 to 3.5 hours at a bare simmer for a 3 lb tongue, with onion, a bay leaf and peppercorns in the water. A skewer should slide into the thickest part with no resistance. Boiling hard toughens it; keep the water just trembling.
- Oven heatNone is given. Use 400F and bake 20 to 30 minutes, basting once or twice, which is enough to set the yolk glaze and color the surface without drying the meat.
- "½ glass of wine"An unfixed measure in this period; period tables usually reckon a wineglassful at about 2 fl oz, which would make half a glass on the order of 1 fl oz, though larger readings are possible. A dry sherry or Madeira suits the dish better than a table wine, and sherry at least matches the Spanish label.
- Half a can of mushroomsCanned mushrooms then came in small tins, so half of one is perhaps 3 to 4 oz drained, though sizes were not standard. Half a pound of fresh mushrooms, sauteed in butter first to drive off their water, gives a far better result and can go into the dish for the last ten minutes.
- The egg-yolk coatingButter and beaten yolk brushed over the hot peeled tongue act as a glaze, browning and gloss rather than a batter. Apply it while the meat is warm so it sets on contact, and reapply once during baking if the surface looks dull.
- CarvingRest ten minutes, then slice thin on a slight diagonal, starting from the wide middle and working toward the tip. The narrow tip end is firmer, and can be kept back for hash or a salad.
Tongue was ordinary household meat in 1900, cheap, sold fresh or pickled by butchers, and treated as a party dish only because it stretched to a crowd and looked handsome whole on a platter. The Spanish attribution here is loose in the way such labels usually were in American "cookery of all nations" books, which assigned nationalities by a single signature flavor rather than by any traced source: wine and mushrooms stood in for Spain. That said, tongue genuinely is a staple of the Spanish kitchen, where lengua is commonly braised or simmered and then finished in a sauce, so the general idea is not far off even if the recipe itself reads as an American cook's version. The book's format, one dish for each day of the year with a country attached, appears to have been a familiar publishing conceit of the era, offering novelty and menu-planning relief to housekeepers expected to produce a different dinner daily.