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HUNGARIAN TONGUE (a German recipe)
Take a fresh bullock's tongue. Put it into a stewpan with a carrot, an onion, a clove of garlic, a bay-leaf, a tea-spoonful of salt, half a dozen peppercorns, half a fresh lemon sliced, and as much water as will cover it. Let it boil; then draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and simmer gently until the tongue is quite tender. Take off the skin, and trim the tongue neatly; strain and reduce the gravy. Mix a table-spoonful of flour very smoothly with two ounces of butter. Keep stirring over the fire until it is lightly browned, and steam a bruised clove of garlic in the browning. Add gradually three-quarters of a pint of gravy, and when quite smooth and thick stir in the juice of half a lemon. Pour a little of the sauce into the dish with the tongue, and send the rest to table in a tureen. Garnish the dish with parsley and sliced lemon. Time, two hours to simmer the tongue. Probable cost of tongue, from 3s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A plain braise with a browned-butter sauce, from a period when a whole ox tongue was ordinary butcher's meat. Most of the work is in the simmering, and the book underestimates how long that takes.
- Bullock's tongueAn ox tongue, typically somewhere around 3 to 5 lb fresh. Order it from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock one. Note that this calls for a fresh tongue, not the brined or pickled tongue sold ready to boil, which would need soaking first and would make the sauce far too salty.
- The stated time is shortTwo hours will not take a whole ox tongue to tenderness. Reckon on 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, and judge by feel rather than the clock: a skewer should slide into the thickest part with no resistance.
- Peel it hotThis is the hinge. The rough outer skin strips off cleanly while the tongue is still steaming; let it cool and the skin bonds tight and comes away in shreds, taking meat with it. Lift it out, run it briefly under cold water so you can handle it, and peel at once.
- "Steam a bruised clove of garlic in the browning"It means infuse, not steam. Crush the clove and let it sizzle gently in the browned flour-and-butter for a minute or two to perfume the roux, then fish it out before adding liquid.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz, about 1 3/4 US cups. Two ounces of butter and a tablespoon of flour is a butter-heavy roux; it will thicken loosely, which is what is wanted here.
- Reducing the gravyStrain out the vegetables and lemon and boil the cooking liquid down hard before it goes into the sauce. Unreduced, it tastes thin and faintly of boiled onion; reduced by half or more it carries the dish.
- Carving and yieldSlice across the grain, thin, starting at the thick end. Eight or nine servings is realistic for a whole tongue as part of a larger meal; as a main course with vegetables, six is nearer the mark.
- CostThree shillings and sixpence to four and six to feed eight or nine works out at a few pence a head, though whether that made tongue notably cheap per pound is less clear. Tongue does appear frequently in Victorian household books.
Boiled and pressed tongue was a staple of the British larder throughout the nineteenth century, cheap, sliceable and good cold, and Cassell's carries several versions of it. What marks this one as borrowed is the sauce: a dark roux sharpened with lemon and garlic, closer to central European kitchen practice than to the parsley or brown sauces the book gives elsewhere. The title is doubly indirect, calling the dish Hungarian while labelling it a German recipe. Notably there is no paprika, the spice most English readers would now expect from anything called Hungarian; its association with Hungarian cooking was still spreading westward at the time.