Home › The Principles of Cookery › BULLOCK'S TONGUE, LARDED (a la Berlin)
BULLOCK'S TONGUE, LARDED (a la Berlin)
When the tongue has boiled for three hours, remove it, but do not throw away the liquor. Peel off the skin, lard the tongue with bacon, and put it into a stewpan with a little of the liquor, a few silver button onions, which have been first fried, a glass of wine, a little sugar, and flour to thicken; stew the tongue in this for an hour, then add the juice of half a lemon, and serve. Probable cost, 5s. to 6s.
A Victorian braise that assumes you already have a large ox tongue boiling on the stove. The technique is sound; only the quantities and equipment need translating.
- Peel while it is hotThe single instruction that decides the dish. The rough outer skin slips away cleanly the moment the tongue comes out of the liquor; let it cool and it clings and tears. Handle it with a cloth and trim the gristle and small bones at the root end at the same time.
- Fresh or salted tongueThe recipe does not say, and both were sold. A salted (pickled) ox tongue should be soaked overnight and the cooking water not salted further; a fresh one wants a well-seasoned pot with onion, carrot and bay. A whole ox tongue runs 3-4 lb and three hours at a bare simmer is about right, though test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- LardingThreading strips of fat bacon through the meat with a larding needle. Few home kitchens own one now. Wrapping the peeled tongue in thin bacon or pancetta before it goes into the stewpan gives much the same richness, though not the marbled cross-section the name promises.
- Silver button onionsSmall pickling onions, peeled whole, roughly an inch across. Fry them in butter until browned before they go in, as directed; the recipe asks only for "a few", so eight or so suits a whole tongue. Frozen peeled pearl onions are a reasonable stand-in.
- A glass of wineA Victorian wine glass is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though for a braise of this size 4-5 fl oz of red wine or Madeira is no excess. "A little sugar" means a teaspoon or so, to balance the lemon at the end, not to sweeten.
- Flour to thickenNo quantity is given. Work about an ounce of flour into an ounce of butter and whisk it into the simmering liquor in pieces, or dust the fried onions with flour before adding the wine. The sauce should coat, not set.
- Stewpan and liquidA heavy lidded pan just large enough to hold the tongue curled. "A little of the liquor" means enough to come a third of the way up, no more, or the hour's stewing dilutes rather than concentrates.
- Cost and yield5s. to 6s. was a substantial outlay for a household dish, reflecting the whole tongue rather than the trimmings. One ox tongue carves into thin slices for eight to ten as a main course.
Ox tongue was a staple of the Victorian middle-class table rather than a delicacy: it went further than most joints, kept well cold under a press, and could be bought fresh or ready-salted from any butcher. Cassell's gives a long run of tongue recipes, and this one carries the tag a la Berlin, part of a broad nineteenth-century habit of attaching continental place names to sweet-sour braises finished with wine, sugar and lemon or vinegar. The combination of browned button onions, a little sugar and an acid finish is the same logic behind German Zunge in Madeirasosse and the sauces served with Rhineland pot roasts, so the name is at least pointing in a plausible direction, even if the dish as written is thoroughly English in method. Larding, which appears here almost in passing, was routine kitchen work in a period when lean braising cuts were commonly threaded with fat before they went near a stewpan.