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Bullock's Tongue, Miroton Of
Fry some slices of onion, shallot, chives, and parsley, in butter; they should be cut small, and fried a pale brown. Add a little flour, mixed with a little good gravy or jelly, and stir till thickish; then lay in slices of ox tongue, seasoned with spice and salt, and simmer for fifteen minutes. Pound some capers and an anchovy, with a little vinegar; make all hot, and pour over the tongue. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. per pound. One pound sufficient for a dish.
A miroton is a reheating dish: it assumes you already have cooked meat on hand, and the whole point is the onion sauce around it. Read the recipe with that in mind and the gaps close up.
- The tongue must already be cookedThe recipe assumes cooked tongue (usually salted and boiled), skinned, cooled and sliced; the fifteen-minute simmer only makes sense that way. Raw tongue sliced into this sauce and simmered fifteen minutes will not be tender. Ready-cooked pressed tongue from a deli or butcher does the same job.
- Slice thin and coldCold pressed tongue cuts cleanly into slices about 3 mm thick; warm tongue tears. The slices only need heating through, which is all the fifteen minutes is doing.
- "Good gravy or jelly"This means the jellied stock from boiling the tongue, or a strong brown stock. A well-reduced beef stock is the modern equivalent; avoid anything sweetened or heavily salted, since the tongue and the anchovy both carry salt.
- "A little flour"Read it as a small roux: about a tablespoon of flour into the butter the onions fried in, loosened with just enough stock to give the "thickish" sauce the recipe asks for. Cook the flour a minute in the butter before the liquid goes in or the sauce tastes raw.
- Season lightly"spice" in Victorian British recipes is rarely defined, but a pinch of mace, ground cloves and black pepper suits the dish. Go carefully with the salt, since the tongue and the anchovy both carry it.
- The anchovy and vinegar go in off the boilPounded capers, anchovy and vinegar are a finishing sauce, not a simmering ingredient. Warm it through and pour it over; prolonged boiling drives off the sharpness that balances the rich onion base.
- ChivesThe recipe has the chives and parsley cut small and fried with the onion and shallot to a pale brown. If you would rather keep them fresh, add them nearer the end, since long frying darkens them.
- Yield and servingThe recipe says one pound is sufficient for a dish, which by modern appetites is three or four servings. Dishes of this kind were a way of using up the remains of a boiled tongue.
- The prices1s. 2d. per pound is pre-decimal sterling from the period of Cassell's (1870s-90s), and means little except beside contemporary prices for other meats.
Miroton is a French term for sliced cooked meat reheated in a well-flavoured onion sauce -- the classic form is boeuf miroton, made from the beef left over from a pot-au-feu. The origin of the word is uncertain; the link sometimes made to mitonner, to simmer gently, is a suggestion rather than an established derivation. Cassell's carried a whole family of such dishes, the English kitchen of the period cooking large joints and then having to account for them across several days, and a boiled salt ox tongue could reappear through the week cold, potted, or dressed like this. The anchovy-and-caper finish is in the English manner, a relative of the sharp fish-and-vinegar sauces the period served with plain boiled meat, and it cuts through what would otherwise be a rich onion gravy.