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Bullock's Tongue, Cured
Mix well together equal quantities of salt and sugar--a large table-spoonful of each--and half a table-spoonful of saltpetre. Rub the tongue with a good handful of common salt, and let it lie all night, then drain, and wipe before adding the above mixture. Lay it out on a board, and rub the mixture all over, not omitting to put some into the hole under the tongue. It must be turned and rubbed with a little extra salt for the first two or three days; then, with a large spoon, moisten the tongue well every morning for a fortnight. A tongue thus pickled will not require any soaking. Probable cost, 5s. to 6s.
This is a dry cure for a whole beef tongue, and it is one of the recipes in this book that cannot be reproduced safely. The problems are in the chemistry and the missing numbers, not in the technique.
- The saltpetre is unmeasurableHalf a tablespoon of potassium nitrate is not a usable dose: nitrate curing is calculated as a percentage of the weight of the meat, and the recipe never says what the tongue weighs. A beef tongue can run anywhere from 2 to 5 lb, so the same spoonful could land far below or far above the legal and safe limit for nitrate in cured meat.
- Nitrate versus modern curing saltVictorian saltpetre converts to nitrite slowly and unevenly over weeks. Modern cures use a premixed nitrite salt at a fixed, dyed, deliberately dilute concentration precisely because pure nitrate and nitrite are dangerous to handle by eye in a domestic kitchen.
- No temperature is givenA fortnight-long cure only works if the meat is held at roughly refrigerator temperature throughout. The recipe never says where to keep it, and a fortnight of curing at warm room temperature is a spoilage risk.
- Not enough salt for the methodA tablespoon of salt and sugar plus a handful of common salt is a light cure for a large, dense, fatty organ meat. Salt has to penetrate to the centre of the tongue, and the recipe relies on daily rubbing and basting with the drawn brine to get it there, with no way to check whether it has arrived.
- "Will not require any soaking"Heavily salted tongues were normally soaked before cooking, so this line points to a comparatively mild cure. It also means the meat is less protected than a heavy brine-cured tongue would be.
- Cost as a dating clueCost -- 5s. to 6s. for a single tongue was a substantial outlay, on the order of a day's wages or more for many working households. Cured tongue was a cold-table dish for better-off tables rather than economy meat.
- What to do insteadIf you want cured tongue, use a current recipe that states the weight of the meat, the exact grams of curing salt, the brine concentration and the holding temperature. Do not scale or adapt the quantities above.
Cured and pressed ox tongue was a fixture of the British cold table from the eighteenth century onward, sold ready-cured by grocers and Italian warehousemen and served in slices at suppers, picnics and wedding breakfasts. Cassell's, compiled for the mid-Victorian household that still expected to do its own preserving, gives the cure as a matter of course alongside dozens of other larder operations. Saltpetre had been used in meat curing for centuries before anyone understood the chemistry: it was valued because it kept the meat a bright red rather than the grey of plain salt beef, and the reason for that colour change was only worked out gradually, from the 1890s into the early twentieth century, as researchers identified nitrite as the active agent. The "hole under the tongue" the recipe insists on packing is exactly the sort of pocket where an under-salted cure fails first.