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Spiced Beef Tongue
Rub into the tongue a mixture of half a pint of sugar, a piece of saltpeter the size of a pea, and a table-spoon of ground cloves; immerse it in a brine made of three-fourths pound salt to two quarts water, taking care that it is kept covered; let lie two weeks, take out, wash well, and dry with a cloth; roll out a thin paste made of flour and water, wrap the tongue in it, and put it in pan to bake; bake slowly, basting well with lard and water; when done, remove paste and skin, and serve.
This is a two-week ambient cure built on an unmeasurable dose of saltpetre, and it cannot be reproduced safely. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering a fix.
- The saltpetre is unquantified"a piece the size of a pea" of potassium nitrate might be a quarter of a gram or something closer to a gram depending on the crystal, and it is rubbed on before the tongue goes into the brine, so the dose actually in the cure is anyone's guess. Nitrate curing salts are regulated by weight for a reason: too little gives no protection, too much is a genuine toxicity concern, and eyeballing a pea does neither job.
- Nitrate is not nitriteSaltpetre only protects meat once bacterial action converts it to nitrite, which is slow and unreliable at uncontrolled temperatures. Modern cured tongue uses a measured nitrite cure at a fixed rate per weight of meat and brine, precisely because the nineteenth-century method left a long window in which nothing was inhibiting spoilage organisms.
- No temperature is given for the two weeksA submerged, covered piece of meat sitting for fourteen days is an anaerobic environment, which is the condition Clostridium botulinum prefers. The recipe assumes a cold cellar in a cold season; nothing in the text says so, and at room temperature the brine will not hold.
- The brine strength is borderlineThe brine strength is not stated as a proportion -- three-quarters of a pound of salt to two quarts of water works out at roughly fifteen percent by weight of the finished brine (about eighteen percent of the water), and it would be diluted further by moisture drawn from the tongue. The recipe gives no instruction to check, top up or re-salt over the fourteen days.
- The bake will not correct the cureBaking wrapped in paste at an unstated slow heat, for an unstated time, cannot be relied on to reach or hold a safe internal temperature throughout a dense muscle, and a slow bake cannot be counted on to deliver the thorough heating that would inactivate any botulinum toxin already formed. The cooking step is the finish here, not the safety step.
- Reading the rest of itFor interest only: half a pint of sugar is one cup; the flour-and-water paste is a huff paste, a sacrificial jacket that seals in moisture and is discarded before serving, as the recipe directs. If you want spiced tongue, use a current recipe with weighed cure and a refrigerated brine.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio in 1877, growing out of a fundraising cookbook compiled for the local Methodist church, and it treats beef tongue as an ordinary economical cut rather than a delicacy — a whole animal was butchered, and everything on it had to be used. Spiced or pickled tongue was one common way to hold one: salt, sugar and saltpetre in a crock, then a slow bake or boil weeks later, producing something sliceable and cold for supper or a picnic basket. Saltpetre was sold at the druggist alongside everything else in the household arsenal, and was valued largely for keeping cured meat red; the chemistry behind its preservative action was not understood until later. The flour-and-water wrapper is older still: a huff paste, a sacrificial crust used to seal meat during a long slow bake, related to the medieval "coffin" pastry case.