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Braised Ox-Tongue
1 ox-tongue, 1 pint stock, 1 onion, 1 small carrot, 1 bouquet garni, 1 clove, 1/2 pint piquante sauce, and 6 thin slices bacon. Trim ox-tongue, which should be obtained salted or pickled ready for use. Blanch, and let it cool. Put into fish-kettle or stewpan, large enough to hold tongue, slices bacon, onion peeled and sliced, carrot scraped and cut in pieces, bouquet garni and clove; add stock, put in tongue, and cook until three parts done, then take it up, and skin while hot. Strain liquor it was cooked in, take off fat, add piquante sauce, put tongue into this, and finish cooking. When tender, cut in slices, dish, and pour sauce over, and serve. Mashed potatoes, spinach, or peas served with tongue is a great improvement.
The piquante sauce is made as follows: 4 shallots, 3 mushrooms, 1 bay leaf, 1/2 carrot, sprig thyme, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons vinegar, half pint brown stock, 1/2 teaspoon anchovy extract, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, 3 tablespoons flour, salt and red pepper to taste. Peel and chop shallots, carrot, and mushrooms; melt Crisco in a saucepan; fry vegetables a nice brown; then add vinegar, bay leaf, and thyme. Reduce vinegar to half the quantity; stir in flour, dilute with stock, bring to boil; then add anchovy extract, Worcestershire sauce, salt and red pepper to taste. Take out thyme and bay leaf. Simmer for 10 minutes. Skim, and use as required.
A salted ox-tongue is a long, slow, forgiving braise, but the original assumes a butcher who sells tongue already cured and a cook who knows how long "until three parts done" takes. Both need filling in.
- The hinge: skin it hotThe tough outer membrane peels away cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming; once it cools the skin welds itself to the meat and has to be cut off in shreds. Lift it out, hold it in a cloth, slit the skin lengthwise and strip it, then trim the gristle and small bones at the root end.
- Buying the tongueA whole beef tongue runs 3-4 lb and serves 8-10. "Salted or pickled ready for use" means brine-cured; cured tongue is harder to come by than fresh now, so order it specifically. If the cure is heavy, soak it overnight in cold water and change the water once.
- BlanchingCover with cold water, bring to the boil, simmer 10-15 minutes, then drain and cool. This draws out excess salt and scum; skipping it leaves the braising liquor too salty to turn into sauce.
- A pint of stock is not enoughOne pint will not cover a whole tongue in any pan large enough to hold it. Add water or additional stock to submerge, and accept a thinner liquor -- it gets strained, defatted and reinforced with the piquante sauce anyway.
- Real timingsTotal simmering time is 3 to 4 hours at a bare tremble, never a rolling boil. "Three parts done" is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 hours; the tongue then finishes in the sauce until a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any neutral fat works for browning the sauce vegetables; butter gives a better flavour, though it browns faster and needs watching.
- Sauce ingredients"Red pepper" is cayenne, used sparingly. Anchovy extract is anchovy essence -- a scant teaspoon of anchovy paste or a splash of colatura stands in. Three tablespoons of flour to half a pint of stock gives a very thick sauce; two is closer to modern taste, and the vinegar should be reduced by half before the flour goes in or the sauce stays sharp.
- ServingCarve across the grain in slices about a quarter-inch thick, working from the thicker middle towards the tip, and nap with the strained sauce. Mashed potato is the right foil for the vinegar in the sauce.
Ox-tongue was standard household meat in Britain and America well into the twentieth century, sold cured by the butcher and served hot with a sharp sauce or pressed cold into a mould for the sideboard. The sauce piquante here is a straight descendant of the classic French brown sauce of the same name -- shallots and vinegar reduced, thickened, and sharpened -- though the anchovy extract and Worcestershire sauce are thoroughly Anglo-American additions, the bottled seasonings of the period doing the work a long-simmered demi-glace once did. The Crisco in the sauce dates the book: it belongs to the run of promotional cookbooks issued after the shortening's introduction in 1911, in which every recipe that once called for butter, lard or drippings was quietly rewritten.