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Neats' Tongues, to Salt for Immediate Use
Take a couple of neats' tongues. Trim them neatly, and cut off the roots without taking away the under fat, wash them thoroughly, dry them in a cloth, and rub them well with two ounces of common salt, one ounce of brown sugar, and half an ounce of saltpetre. Place them in a long deep pan, and turn and rub them every day for a fortnight, at the end of which time they will be ready for use. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. each. Sufficient, one tongue for eight or nine persons.
This is a dry-cure, not a cooking method, and it is the one category of Victorian recipe that does not translate. The figures below explain where it falls outside modern limits.
- The saltpetre is the problemHalf an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is about 14 g. Spread over two tongues weighing perhaps 6-8 lb together, that works out to several thousand parts per million of nitrate, far above the maximum permitted in cured meat today. Curing nitrate and nitrite are now sold pre-diluted in salt precisely because weighing them neat at this scale is unsafe.
- No temperature is givenA fortnight of daily turning was carried out in an unheated Victorian larder or cellar, which would have been cold for much of the year. In a modern kitchen at room temperature the same fortnight is an incubation, and the recipe gives no guidance at all on where to keep the pan.
- The salt is too low to protect the meatThe salt is light -- Two ounces of salt for two whole tongues is a light rub by modern curing standards, and the recipe gives no brine strength or target weight loss to work to.
- "Ready for use" does not mean ready to eatA salted tongue was afterwards soaked and then simmered for three to four hours. Nothing in this entry brings the meat to a safe temperature, so the page as printed stops short of a complete, safe process. Use a current curing recipe with weighed cure salt and a stated refrigeration temperature.
- What a neat's tongue is"Neat" is an old word for an ox or bullock; a neat's tongue is simply beef tongue, still sold by butchers at 3-4 lb. The "root" is the thick muscular base, and the "under fat" the fatty layer beneath it.
- Cost and yieldThe stated yield of eight or nine servings per tongue is realistic for thin-sliced cold tongue.
Salt beef tongue was a fixture of the English cold table well into the twentieth century: pressed into a round tin, glazed, and sliced thin for suppers, picnics and breakfast sideboards. This is a quicker fortnight cure "for immediate use", which reflects a household that expected to salt its own meat rather than buy it ready-cured. Saltpetre had been used in curing for centuries before anyone understood why it worked — the nitrate must first be reduced to nitrite, which is what fixes the pink colour and inhibits spoilage organisms — and this recipe measures it out by the half-ounce. The nitrite chemistry, and the regulatory limits that came with it, belong to the twentieth century, which is why a recipe like this once read as ordinary and reads as unusable now.