Take fresh beef-tongue; make an incision with a sharp knife and fill with chopped onions, bread-crumbs, a lump of butter, sage, thyme, salt and pepper. Sew up and let boil until nearly done. Remove the skin. Then stick cloves all over the tongue, and let cook until tender. Add 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar and 1 tablespoonful of butter. Serve, garnished with sliced beets, olives and sprigs of parsley.
A whole simmered tongue with a stuffing pushed into the middle of it, finished with cloves and a sharp buttered liquor. The instructions assume you know how long a tongue takes; they are otherwise workable as written.
- The hinge: peel it while it is hotThe skin comes off in one sheet only while the tongue is still steaming. Let it cool in the pot and the membrane grips; lift it out, hold it with a towel, and slit the skin lengthwise from the root before pulling.
- "Fresh" tongue means unbrinedThe recipe wants a fresh beef tongue, not the pickled or corned tongue that was also commonly sold at the time. A supermarket may only have cured; ask a butcher, or rinse and soak a cured one to draw out salt, and cut the added salt in the stuffing.
- Size and timingA beef tongue runs 3 to 4 lb. "Boil until nearly done" is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, then another 30 to 45 minutes with the cloves, until a skewer slides into the thick end with no resistance. Never a rolling boil, which toughens the muscle.
- Cutting the pocketTongue is dense and solid, with no natural cavity. Drive a narrow boning knife in at the thick root end and work it back and forth to open a tunnel rather than butterflying the whole thing, then pack the stuffing in with your fingers or the handle of a spoon and sew the opening closed with butcher's twine.
- Quantities for the stuffingNone are given. About 1 cup fresh breadcrumbs, 1 medium onion, 2 tablespoons butter and a teaspoon each of chopped sage and thyme fills a tongue of this size. Sweat the onion first; raw onion in a sealed pocket steams rather than softens.
- ClovesStudding means pushing whole cloves through the peeled surface at intervals, as with a baked ham. A dozen to twenty is plenty for a whole tongue; more and the cooking liquid turns medicinal.
- The finishThe recipe does not say where the vinegar and butter go; the likeliest reading is into the cooking liquid at the end rather than poured over the meat. Reduce a cup or so of the strained broth, whisk in the butter off the heat and add the vinegar last so it keeps its edge.
- Yield and carvingA 3 to 4 lb tongue serves six to eight. Slice across the grain, starting at the tip, on the diagonal; the root end is fattier and best cut thicker. Sliced beets and olives are a period plate, and the sharp sauce is doing the same job.
Boiled tongue with a sharp, sweet-sour sauce is a fixture of Central and Eastern European cooking, and the vinegar-and-butter finish here belongs to that tradition rather than to the English habit of pressing tongue cold in its own jelly. The clove-studded surface and beet garnish are what mark it "Russian" for an American cookbook of this period: books like this one worked through a calendar of national dishes, and the nationality was often carried by a single signature touch rather than by anything a Russian cook would have recognised as a whole. Tongue itself needed no explaining to readers of the time: it was sold fresh, pickled or smoked, and appeared at both plain family dinners and cold buffets. Stuffing it, as here, is a way of stretching one organ meat into a company dish.