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CHICKEN AND TONGUE WITH CAULIFLOWERS (a handsome supper dish)
Boil a tongue and two chickens according to the directions given for both. Brush the tongue over with glaze, place it in the middle of a large dish, and put a chicken on each side of it. Cover the birds with white sauce, and garnish the dish with small cauliflowers or Brussels sprouts. Serve hot. If preferred, celery may be boiled, and substituted for the cauliflowers, or the chickens and tongue may be served cold, and the dish garnished with cut lemon and parsley. Time, half an hour for the chickens, two hours for the tongue, twenty minutes for the cauliflowers. Sufficient, two chickens and a tongue for six persons. Probable cost: chickens, about 5s. per pair; tongue, 4s.; cauli-flowers, 2d. each.
This is an assembly recipe: the book expects you to already have its instructions for boiled fowl and boiled tongue, and here only tells you how to compose the platter. The points worth attention are the timings, which belong to a very different set of ingredients.
- Chickens in half an hourThat timing only works for small young chickens, poached in barely trembling water; the book assumes far smaller birds than we buy. A modern 4 lb bird wants 60-75 minutes at a bare simmer, until the thigh joint reads 165F.
- Two hours for the tongueShort by modern reckoning for a whole ox tongue, which needs three to four hours of gentle simmering before the skin slips off and a skewer goes through the thick end without resistance. Two hours suits a calf's or lamb's tongue. Salted tongue should be soaked overnight and the first water discarded.
- Skin and press itThe tongue is peeled while hot -- the skin lifts away in sheets if you start at the tip -- then trimmed of gristle at the root. For a handsome sliced platter, curl it into a tin, weight it and chill; for serving hot, skin it and glaze it straight away.
- GlazeVictorian glaze is meat stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm, brushed on in thin coats. Reduced tongue cooking liquor works if it is not too salty; otherwise reduce good brown stock until it coats a spoon heavily. Skip it and the tongue looks grey rather than lacquered.
- White sauceThe chicken poaching liquor makes a better sauce here than milk: a pale roux let down with the strained broth and finished with cream gives a velout type sauce, though the book's own 'white sauce' may well be milk-based. It should coat the birds, not pool around them, so keep it thick enough to cling.
- Twenty minutes for cauliflowerToo long for florets, which turn to mush and go sulphurous in that time; six to eight minutes in well-salted water, drained dry, is enough. Small whole heads as the recipe intends will need longer, ten to fifteen minutes. Brussels sprouts take about the same as florets.
- Serving a large hot platterThree cooked items and a garnish will lose heat fast on a cold dish. Warm the platter, keep the sauce hot in a bain-marie, and carve the tongue at the table. The cold version the recipe offers is honestly the easier one to serve well.
- Costs and yieldThe prices are pre-decimal British shillings and pence and are of historical interest only. Six is a fair count for two small chickens and a tongue; with one modern large chicken and a whole ox tongue you will feed eight or more.
Dishes of this kind belong to the era of the dressed supper table, when a cold or warm collation was set out whole for guests to see before it was carved. Boiled fowl with a white sauce and boiled tongue were both standing items in nineteenth-century English cookery, and glazed tongue in particular was a set piece of the buffet, valued because it sliced neatly, held its shape when pressed and looked well against pale poultry. Cassell's, published for middle-class households with a cook rather than a chef, is full of these composite entries: the technical work sits in the separate recipes for boiling a tongue and boiling a fowl, and the page here is really a plan for the platter. The alternatives offered -- sprouts or celery for the cauliflower, cold with lemon and parsley instead of hot with sauce -- show the book giving a household one framework it could dress several ways.