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Neats' Tongues Cured for Keeping
Prepare two tongues by trimming them neatly and cutting off the roots without disturbing the under fat. Wash and dry them, and rub them well with an ounce of saltpetre and an ounce of sal prunella. Rub them well every day for four days; place them in a long earthenware pan, cover them with a pound of common salt, and turn them every day for three weeks. Wipe them with a soft cloth, dip them in bran, and hang them in smoke for a fortnight. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. each.
This is a nineteenth-century dry-cure and cold-smoke for beef tongue, and it belongs to the history shelf rather than the kitchen. The problems are the nitrate dose, the absence of any temperature at any stage, and a fortnight of smoking that does not cook anything.
- The nitrate dose is far out of rangeAn ounce of saltpetre plus an ounce of sal prunella is roughly 56 g of potassium nitrate rubbed into two tongues weighing perhaps 5-6 lb together, though only part of a surface rub is taken up by the meat. Sal prunella is saltpetre that has been melted and cast into cakes (sometimes with a little sulphur added), so this is a double dose of the same chemical. Modern curing rules limit ingoing nitrite to roughly 150-200 parts per million of the meat; this quantity is far in excess of that, and excess nitrate and nitrite are toxic, not merely undesirable.
- No temperature is given anywhereSafe curing depends on holding the meat below about 40F for the whole of the salting period so that spoilage and pathogenic bacteria cannot outpace the salt as it penetrates. A Victorian larder or cellar was cold in January and not in July, and the recipe assumes the cook knows which. Three weeks under salt at room temperature is a spoilage risk that the salt alone will not reliably cover.
- Cold smoke is not cookingHanging in smoke for a fortnight is a drying and flavouring step carried out well below any temperature that kills bacteria. The tongue leaves the smokehouse raw. Nitrate curing is intended in part to suppress Clostridium botulinum, and getting the balance of cure and salt wrong in a cured meat is one route to botulism.
- The salt quantity is unmeasured against the meatA pound of common salt poured over whatever the tongues happen to weigh is not a ratio. Modern cures are normally expressed as a percentage of the weight of the meat, because that is the way to know whether the cure has actually reached the centre of a thick, dense muscle like a tongue.
- Sal prunella is not sold as a food ingredientIt survives, where it survives at all, as a chemical reagent and as an old pharmacy item for sore throats. Nothing labelled sal prunella today is intended or controlled for eating.
- If you want cured tongueUse a current recipe with a weighed nitrite curing salt, a stated brine or dry-cure percentage, refrigerated cure times and a final cooked temperature. Do not attempt to scale or adjust the quantities above.
- Reading the priceThree shillings and sixpence to four and six per tongue places this among the more substantial larder purchases of the later Victorian household, which is why the book treats two tongues as a project worth five weeks of attention.
A "neat" is an ox or cow, from the Old English neat for cattle, and neats' tongues appear in English cookery books from the seventeenth century onward as one of the standard preserved meats of a well-stocked larder. Salted and smoked tongue kept for months and was sliced thin for the cold table. Saltpetre gave cured beef the pink colour buyers expected, and also contributed to its keeping; the nitrate-to-nitrite chemistry behind both was not worked out until around the turn of the twentieth century. Sal prunella, the same salt melted and cast into small cakes, was kept by druggists.