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TO CURE AND DRY BEEF TONGUES
For one dozen tongues make a brine of a gallon and a half of water (or enough to cover them well), two pints good salt, one of molasses, or one pound brown sugar, and four red peppers; bring to a boil, skin, and set to cool. Pack the tongues in a large jar, and when the brine is entirely cold, pour it over them, put on a weight, let remain ten or twelve days, take out, drain, and hang to smoke about two days, ther dry moderately, and put away in a flour sack in a dry place. When wanted for use, boil six or eight hours in a pot filled with water, adding more when necessary so as to keep well covered all the time until done; when done, take out and set away to cool, but do not skin till needed for the table.
SAUSAGE. For ten pounds meat take five tablespoons sage, four of salt and two of pepper. Some add one tablespoon ginger, and some a little summer savory. When nicely minced, pack in jars, and treat precisely as in preceding recipe-"To Keep Hams." If kept in a cool place, and care taken to replace the lard, th there is no difficulty in keeping sausage perfectly fresh almost any length of time. Some persons partially cook meat meat before packing, but this is not necessary. Fresh meat may be kept nicely in the same way, being first seasoned with salt and pepper.
Or, one pound salt, one-half pint of sage and three and one-half ounces pepper, scattered over forty pounds of meat before grinding.
This is a cold-brine cure followed by cold smoking and open-air drying, with a sausage-in-lard preservation method appended. Both halves fall outside what can be done safely in a home kitchen today, and neither can be repaired with a temperature or a timing.
- The brine contains no curing saltTwo pints of salt with molasses or brown sugar produces a flavouring brine, not a cure. Without measured nitrite or nitrate, a dense, folded muscle like tongue held for ten to twelve days at cellar temperature gives Clostridium botulinum exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid interior it needs. The pathogen produces no smell, no gas and no visible change in the meat.
- "Hang to smoke about two days"The recipe specifies no smokehouse temperature, but two days of hanging in smoke is most consistent with cold smoking: smoke without meaningful heat. On that reading the meat sits for two days in the range where surface and interior bacteria multiply freely, and smoke deposits no antimicrobial dose worth counting. Cold smoking is only defensible as part of a validated cure with measured nitrite, salt concentration and temperature, none of which appear here.
- Storage in a flour sackAir-drying a cured tongue to shelf stability depends on hitting a specific water activity, which is measured, not judged by eye. "Dry moderately" and a cloth bag in a dry place leaves a product whose safety is entirely unknown, and a room-temperature flour sack is not a barrier to mould or insects.
- Boiling six to eight hours does not fix itBoiling six to eight hours does not make an unmeasured cure safe -- Prolonged boiling will kill the organisms, and botulinum toxin itself is destroyed by sustained heat, but heat-stable toxins such as staphylococcal enterotoxin survive cooking, and a long boil is no substitute for a controlled cure with measured salt, nitrite and temperature.
- The sausage half is a lard-sealed crockRaw seasoned meat (pork, on the evidence of the cross-reference to "To Keep Hams" and the lard) packed into jars and covered with lard is a sealed anaerobic environment at cellar temperature. The recipe's own confidence that meat will keep "almost any length of time" describes precisely the conditions that generate botulinum toxin. The note that some cooks partially cook the meat first, "but this is not necessary," makes it worse rather than better.
- The seasoning ratios are the only reusable partFive tablespoons sage, four of salt and two of pepper to ten pounds of meat is a workable fresh breakfast-sausage seasoning, and the alternate ratio of one pound salt to forty pounds of meat is about 2.5 per cent. Those numbers can inform a fresh sausage made and refrigerated in the ordinary way; the preservation method around them cannot.
- If you want cured tongueUse a current recipe from a source that specifies curing salt by weight, brine strength, refrigeration temperature and a hot-smoke or fully cooked finish. Do not adapt this one.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877, out of Marysville and later Minneapolis) was assembled for households that killed their own hogs and beeves and had to make the whole animal last the year, which is why the curing chapter reads like inventory management rather than cooking. A dozen tongues at once was not extravagance: butchering happened in cold weather, all at once, and everything perishable had to be brined, smoked or packed in fat within days. Salt, sugar or molasses and smoke were the tools available, and the saltpetre that appears in many contemporary ham recipes is conspicuously absent here, which is a large part of why this particular version cannot be recommended. Cured and smoked tongue was a staple cold cut for suppers and picnics through the nineteenth century, sliced thin from the pressed muscle; the recipe directs that it not be skinned until it goes to the table. The sausage-in-lard note that follows describes the same logic in a different medium: a crock of seasoned pork sealed under rendered fat was the standard farm larder before mechanical refrigeration.