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Boiled Beef Tongue
Wash clean, put in the pot with water to cover it, a pint of salt, and a small pod of red pepper; if the water boils away, add more so as to keep the tongue nearly covered until done; boil until it can be pierced easily with a fork, take out, and if needed for present use, take off the skin and set away to cool; if to be kept some days, do not peel until wanted for table. The same amount of salt will do for three tongues if the pot is large enough to hold them, always remembering to keep sufficient water in the kettle to cover all while boiling. Soak salt tongue over night, and cook in same way, omitting the salt. Or, after peeling, place the tongue in saucepan with one cup water, one-half cup vinegar, four table-spoons sugar, and cook till liquor is evaporated. - M. J. W.
A plain simmered tongue with an optional sweet-sour glaze at the end. Nothing here is difficult, but two things decide the outcome: the peeling and the heat.
- Peel while hotThe skin lifts cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming; once cool it grips and has to be cut away with loss of meat. Lift it out, run cold water over it for a few seconds so you can handle it, then slit the skin lengthwise and strip it. The instruction to leave the skin on for storage is sound — it keeps the meat moist — but it means reheating in the broth before peeling.
- A pint of saltThat is roughly two cups, better than a pound by weight. The recipe says the same quantity will do for three tongues in a large pot, so it is a heavy salting of the cooking water rather than a measured cure. Two tablespoons per gallon of water gives a tongue that tastes seasoned rather than salted; the original quantity will strike most modern palates as very salty.
- Simmer, do not boilDespite the name, keep the water at a bare shiver. A rolling boil tightens the muscle and the tongue stays tough no matter how long it goes.
- TimeThe book gives none. A three- to four-pound beef tongue takes about three hours, a smaller veal tongue about ninety minutes. Judge by the fork test as written — it should slide in with no resistance at the thick end.
- Salt tongueThis means a corned or brine-cured tongue, then sold from a barrel at the butcher. Supermarket tongue today is almost always fresh; if you buy a cured one from a deli counter or kosher butcher, the overnight soak and the omission of added salt still apply.
- The pod of red pepperMost likely a whole dried hot pepper rather than a chopped one; in a large pot of water it will scent the broth more than heat it. A single small dried chile is the right scale.
- The vinegar finishOne cup water, half a cup vinegar, four tablespoons sugar reduced to a glaze over the peeled tongue, as the recipe directs. Sweet-sour handling of tongue of this kind is associated with German-American cooking, though it is not exclusive to it. Turn the tongue often as the liquid goes syrupy or the sugar will catch and burn.
- Yield and servingA three-pound tongue serves six to eight. Slice thin across the grain, starting from the tip; the thick root end is fattier and often trimmed. Cold sliced tongue is best used within three or four days; the recipe's own note that an unpeeled tongue may be kept some days shows it was expected to be eaten cold as well as hot.
Tongue was ordinary butcher's meat in nineteenth-century America, not a curiosity — cheap, keeping well once cured, and yielding a large amount of lean sliceable meat from a single cut. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled from Ohio housewives' contributions and published in 1877, treats it as a staple of the meat chapter alongside roasts and stews, and the contributor's initials at the end are typical of the book's method of crediting individual women for their own receipts. The two finishes offered here may reflect different strands of American cooking of the period: the plain salted boil is often associated with English and New England practice, while the water-vinegar-sugar reduction suggests the sweet-sour handling said to be common in German settlements throughout Ohio and Pennsylvania. Tongue stayed on delicatessen counters well into the twentieth century and remains standard in Jewish, Mexican and Eastern European kitchens, whatever the reasons for its retreat from mainstream American tables.