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Curried Ox-Tongue
6 slices cooked ox-tongue 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls curry powder 6 chopped mushrooms 1 cupful brown sauce 1 dinner roll 1 egg 1 cupful boiled rice For tongue. Cut slices of tongue, fry in Crisco, season with 1/4 teaspoonful salt and curry powder, then add mushrooms, and brown sauce, simmer ten minutes. Cut large dinner roll into slices, and toast them lightly on both sides; dip them in egg well beaten, then fry in hot Crisco and drain. Dish up slices of tongue alternately with fried slices of roll, pour sauce round base, and serve with boiled rice.
For brown sauce. Melt 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco, add 1 chopped onion, piece of carrot, 2 mushrooms, and fry a good brown color; stir in 2 tablespoonfuls flour and fry it also; then add 1 cupful stock or water and few drops of kitchen bouquet. Let all cook ten minutes, stirring constantly add seasoning of salt and pepper, and strain for use.
Sufficient for 6 slices.
Fried Chicken, Mexican Style 1 tender chicken Salt and pepper to taste 1 clove garlic 1 seeded green pepper 2 large tomatoes 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco Corn croquettes
A tidy way to use up the back half of a boiled ox tongue, built around a quick brown sauce. The trailing lines about fried chicken belong to the next recipe in the book and should be ignored.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears in nearly every recipe. Butter, or half butter and half neutral oil, does the same work here and tastes better in the sauce.
- Cooked ox-tongueThe recipe simply calls for tongue already cooked; a whole tongue would often have been simmered, peeled and pressed and served cold before the remainder was used up this way. Whole beef tongue is still sold by butchers and many Latin American and kosher markets; it needs roughly 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer before peeling. Sliced cooked tongue from a deli is the shortcut.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still manufactured and shelved near the gravy mixes. A few drops of dark soy or a spoonful of very dark caramelised onion gives similar colour.
- Brown sauce firstMake and strain the sauce before you touch the tongue, or the slices sit and toughen. The hinge is browning the flour properly in the fat: it should smell nutty and go the colour of a hazelnut shell, which takes several minutes over medium heat and is what keeps the sauce from tasting pasty.
- Simmer, do not boilTongue is already fully cooked. Ten minutes at a lazy simmer is to marry the curry and sauce; a hard boil dries the slices out and makes them grainy.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder of this period was generally a mild, turmeric-forward blend. Bloom it in the hot fat for thirty seconds before the mushrooms go in -- dropped into liquid it stays raw and dusty.
- The dinner rollA soft white roll, cut into slices, toasted, egg-dipped and fried -- essentially savoury croûtes standing in for fried bread. The recipe gives no number or thickness; matching the six slices of tongue is the obvious reading. Any enriched white roll works; a crusty baguette will not absorb the egg.
- YieldThe recipe says only 'sufficient for 6 slices'. With the rice that would serve roughly three as a main course, or more as one course of the multi-course dinners this calendar lays out.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s, when Crisco was new and needed to prove it could stand in for both butter and lard; that is why hydrogenated shortening turns up in a curry sauce, in fried bread and in the frying pan alike. The dish itself is late-Victorian Anglo-Indian cookery of the thrifty sort: curry powder, a flour-thickened brown sauce and a few mushrooms were the standard treatment for cold cooked meat, and boiled ox tongue — cheap, served cold and pressed for one meal — was a familiar leftover in a household that bought whole cuts. Arranging the slices alternately with fried croûtes and pouring the sauce around rather than over the meat is the service style of the period.