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Ox Tongue, Cured
Cut away the root, which may afterwards be stewed for stock, leave a little of the fat, and trim the tongue neatly. Rub it well with common salt, and leave it until the next day; drain, and dry it. Mix together one ounce of pounded saltpetre, two ounces of moist sugar, and half a pound of salt. Dry them well, and rub every part of the tongue thoroughly with the powder. Turn it and rub it again every day for three weeks, when it will be ready for cooking, or, if not wanted immediately, for drying or smoking. Probable cost, 4s. to 6s. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
This is a three-week dry cure held at room temperature, and the curing salt is measured in a way no modern authority would accept. The notes below explain the specific problems rather than adjusting the method.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeOne ounce of potassium nitrate rubbed into a single tongue of a few pounds is far more nitrate than modern limits on ingoing nitrate in cured meat allow, even allowing that only part of a surface rub is taken up. Saltpetre was sold loose by the ounce in the nineteenth century and no maximum ingoing level existed; current practice uses pre-diluted curing mixtures because pure saltpetre cannot be dosed accurately by hand at this scale.
- No temperature is given for the three weeksA dry cure of this length depends entirely on being held cold, around 36-40F, so that spoilage and Clostridium botulinum are held back while salt penetrates. The recipe assumes a cold larder that most kitchens no longer have, and gives the cook no way to know whether the meat is curing or simply rotting slowly.
- Drying and smoking are unspecified"For drying or smoking" covers a cold-smoke that never reaches a pasteurising temperature. Cold-smoked cured meat is exactly the product for which modern guidance calls for measured nitrite, measured salt levels and controlled temperature. None of the three is present here.
- Rubbing every day is not a substitute for controlThe recipe's only instruction over three weeks is to turn and rub, which redistributes the cure and the liquid drawn out of the meat; it gives the cook no measurement of anything. If you want cured tongue, follow a current recipe with weighed cure percentages.
- Reading the old measures"Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar; "common salt" is ordinary salt, as distinct from the saltpetre. The costing of 4s. to 6s. is pre-decimal shillings, the book's estimate of what making the dish would cost at the time of writing.
- Scale of the jointAn ox tongue runs roughly 3 to 5 lb fresh and the book's estimate of eight or nine servings is plausible, since cured tongue is sliced thin. The root the recipe sets aside for stock is the thick muscular base, and the recipe is right that it will make stock.
Cured and pressed ox tongue was a fixture of the British cold table for most of the nineteenth century, and curing was understood as a preserving technique a household performed for itself, like potting or salting beef. Saltpetre earned its place in such recipes chiefly because it fixed the meat's colour, keeping the interior a bright pink instead of the grey-brown of plain salt beef; it was also believed to firm the texture. The chemistry behind that colour was not understood until the late nineteenth century, when nitrate was shown to be reduced to nitrite in the cure, and the connection between nitrite dose and botulism control came later still, which is why Victorian quantities look so alarming now. Whole tongue survives in Britain as a deli meat and remains central to Jewish delicatessen cooking, but the curing has moved almost entirely to commercial producers working to measured limits.