Home › The Principles of Cookery › OX TONGUE (a I'Ecarlate)
OX TONGUE (a I'Ecarlate)
Wash a pickled tongue thoroughly, and leave it to soak in cold water for two days, after which rub it with saltpetre and a little brown sugar; season it with whole pepper, and let it lie in cold salted water for another four days, turning it every day. Then put it on to boil in water, to which has been added a little of the brine, an onion, a carrot, a bay-leaf, and a little parsley. When the tongue is done, skin it, place it in a deep dish, and pour the liquor (strained through a tamis) over it. Probable cost, 4s. to 6s.
The finished dish — cold spiced tongue in its own jelly — is a real and good thing, but the method here is a curing procedure with no measured cure, no weights and no temperatures, and it cannot be followed safely.
- Unmeasured saltpetre"Rub it with saltpetre" gives no quantity. Potassium nitrate and nitrite are dosed by weight against the weight of the meat, and rubbing on an eyeballed handful can put a large amount of nitrate on a single tongue. There is no way to read a safe dose out of this instruction.
- Six days at unstated temperatureTwo days soaking in cold water, then four more in salted water, with no indication of temperature. In a Victorian larder "cold" meant a cool stone room; a modern kitchen at 20C is a warm incubator for a wet piece of offal. Curing brines are held at refrigerator temperature and the recipe gives no such instruction.
- The soak works against the cureTwo days in plain cold water strips salt and nitrite out of a tongue that was already pickled, and the second brine is described only as "cold salted water" with no salt concentration. The meat spends most of a week under-protected, which is the opposite of what a cure is for.
- No doneness test"When the tongue is done" is the only guidance. Tongue is a dense muscle that needs hours of simmering, and the recipe offers neither a time nor a temperature nor the usual test of the skin slipping freely.
- If you want the dishUse a current recipe for corned or spiced tongue from a source that specifies cure weights, brine strength, refrigeration and an internal temperature. Ready-cured tongues are also sold, and only need simmering.
- Vocabulary, for reading the pageA tamis is a fine drum sieve of woven cloth, used here to clear the stock. A l'ecarlate is French for "scarlet", the colour saltpetre gives cured meat. The "probable cost, 4s. to 6s." is four to six shillings, a substantial sum for a household dish at the time.
Cold pressed or jellied tongue was a fixture of the British and French cold table through the nineteenth century, cheap in relation to the meat it yielded and convenient because it kept and carved well. The name a l'ecarlate points to the whole reason saltpetre was in the recipe at all: nitrate is reduced to nitrite, which reacts with the pigment in the muscle to fix it as a bright pink-red rather than the grey-brown of plainly boiled meat, and cooks understood the effect long before the chemistry was described. Salting and pickling were still treated as basic household skills, done at home in crocks in a cold larder, with quantities passed on by habit; the vagueness of "rub it with saltpetre" reflects a period when the ingredient sat on the kitchen shelf beside the salt and no one thought to weigh it.