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BULLOCK'S TONGUE, CURED (another way)
To half an ounce of saltpetre, pounded, two ounces of common salt, and an ounce and a half of coarse sugar, add a little bay salt, and rub it into a tongue every day for eight or nine days, turning it frequently. Remove it from the pickle, drain, and hang it in a warm but not hot place, to dry and harden. It may be cooked whole, or a small piece may be cut off as required, and when boiled, grated for gravy. Probable cost, 5s. to 6s.
This is a dry cure followed by unrefrigerated air-drying, and both halves of it fall outside what can be done safely in a domestic kitchen today. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering substitutions.
- The saltpetre is unmeasured against the meatHalf an ounce of potassium nitrate is about 14 g, applied to a single tongue of unstated weight — typically 3 to 4 lb. Modern curing salts are dosed by weight of meat to keep residual nitrite within a narrow legal range, and nitrate cures in particular need a known conversion rate over a known time. A recipe that fixes the cure and leaves the meat variable cannot be brought into range by guesswork.
- "A warm but not hot place"Air-drying cured meat depends on a controlled combination of temperature, humidity and airflow, and is normally done cool rather than warm. A warm domestic room falls within the range in which spoilage and pathogenic bacteria can multiply in the interior of a large muscle before the surface has dried enough to protect it.
- Bay saltBay salt was coarse sea salt, evaporated in salt pans, and in period cures it was valued for dissolving slowly. Here it is added as "a little" — an unquantified variable in a cure that already lacks a fixed meat weight.
- Coarse sugarUnrefined or partly refined sugar, closer to today's demerara or a soft dark brown sugar. Its main role here is to soften the harshness of the salt; the preservative work is done by the salt and saltpetre.
- If you want a cured tongueUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure percentages by weight of meat, a brine or cure time tied to thickness, and a cooking temperature. Salt beef and cured tongue are still entirely achievable at home under those conditions.
- Probable costFive to six shillings for a tongue was a substantial outlay for most Victorian households, and the entry allows for a small piece to be cut off as required rather than the whole being eaten at once.
Cassell's gives several methods for tongue because a cured ox tongue was one of the most useful things a Victorian larder could hold: bought whole, cured at home, and then drawn on for weeks as cold meat, sandwich filling or, as here, a grated seasoning for gravy. Saltpetre appears in nearly every meat cure of the period for the same two reasons it is still used in regulated form today \once otherwise turn grey, and it suppresses spoilage — though the chemistry of nitrate reducing to nitrite was not worked out until later. The alternative here is the drying method rather than the more common wet pickle, producing something closer to a hung, hard-cured tongue than the soft boiled tongue pressed into a mould. Bay salt, whose name is variously traced to the shallow bays where seawater was evaporated and to the Bay of Biscay and Baie de Bourgneuf trade, was the standard coarse curing salt of British kitchens and was generally reckoned to draw more slowly and evenly than fine table salt.