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Bullock's Tongue, Pickled and Baked
Prepare the following ingredients:--Two ounces of bay salt, one ounce of saltpetre, a few cloves, a blade of mace, and some allspice, all pounded together; add them to six ounces of salt, and three ounces of coarse brown sugar; mix well, and rub it into the tongue, and turn it every day for fifteen days, then put it into the oven with some butter over it, in pieces, and a common crust over all. Bake until very tender; try it with a wooden skewer--if it offers no resistance it is ready. Peel, and straighten it out on a board, and when cold, glaze and send to table with a ruffle round the root. Probable cost, 5s. to 6s.
This is a dry cure followed by a long slow bake, and the cure is the problem. The terminology is worth unpicking, but the quantities and the method belong to a household with a cold larder and no understanding of nitrate chemistry.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, roughly 28 g) rubbed into a single tongue is far more nitrate than modern curing practice allows: permitted ingoing levels are measured in the low hundreds of parts per million, and nitrate and nitrite are now sold pre-diluted into pink curing salt precisely so that a cook cannot add them by eye. How much of a dry surface rub any part of the meat actually takes up is unknowable, which is the objection.
- No temperature is given for fifteen daysThe tongue sits under rub, turned daily, for over two weeks at whatever temperature the room happens to be. A cure of this kind depends on being held cold throughout, and the recipe says nothing about it — presumably a cool larder was taken for granted. At modern ambient temperatures the same instruction is much less safe.
- Cured meat and Clostridium botulinumThe reason nitrate and nitrite are in a cure at all is to suppress C. botulinum in a dense, salty, low-oxygen piece of meat. Getting that balance wrong in either direction — too little to inhibit, or an uncontrolled excess — is why curing is now done to measured weights rather than to a handful of pounded spice. Use a current, tested cure recipe if you want to salt a tongue.
- "Bay salt"Coarse sea salt evaporated in shallow basins, sold in large crystals. It is not flavoured with bay. Where old recipes distinguish it from "salt", the difference is grain size and slower dissolution, not seasoning.
- "A common crust over all"Probably the stiff flour-and-water paste of the kind called huff paste, laid over the dish as a lid rather than served: it sealed in steam during the long bake and would have been broken off and discarded. The butter beneath it is there to keep the surface from drying.
- "Glaze" and "a ruffle round the root"The glaze is reduced, clarified meat stock brushed over the tongue once it is cold, setting to a shine. The ruffle is a frilled paper cuff slipped over the thick end for the buffet table, the same object still used on a crown roast.
- The cost noteThe five to six shillings most likely reflects the price of the tongue itself rather than the whole finished dish. Cassell's gives a 'probable cost' throughout, which let a housekeeper weigh a dish against her budget.
Cold pressed and glazed ox tongue was a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian cold table, the sort of thing that sat on a sideboard through a ball supper, a shooting lunch or a wedding breakfast and could be carved thin by anyone. Tongue took well to salting, kept for a long time once cured, and looked substantial for its price, which is why it appears again and again in nineteenth-century household manuals. Saltpetre had been used in meat curing for centuries by this date, valued for the clear red colour it gave and for the fact that cured meat plainly kept better, though the microbiology behind it was not worked out until around the turn of the twentieth century. Cassell's, compiled as an alphabetical dictionary for the middle-class household rather than the professional kitchen, gives the method as common knowledge and assumes the cook already has a cold larder and a sense of how heavily to salt.