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Ox Tongue, Fresh, Larded
Soak the tongue, and boil it gently for about three hours. Take off the rough skin, and lard the upper part of the tongue evenly with strips of fat bacon. Put it again into the saucepan with as much of the liquor in which it was boiled as will cover it, a dozen fried button onions, a little pepper and salt, and an ounce and a half of butter, rolled thickly in flour. Stew gently for an hour. A quarter of an hour before the tongue is taken up, put with it a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice and a glassful of port. Serve the tongue on a hot dish with the gravy poured over it. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 4s. to 6s. Sufficient for eight or nine persons.
A straightforward braise once the tongue is peeled, but two details decide the result: skinning it while it is still hot, and keeping the second cooking at a bare tremble so the larding fat renders into the meat rather than out of it.
- Peel it hotThe rough skin lifts away cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming; let it cool and it grips. Hold it with a cloth, slit the skin along the underside and strip it off, then trim the gristle, small bones and fat at the root end.
- Fresh, not pickled"Fresh" here distinguishes it from the salted or brine-cured tongue also widely sold. A fresh ox tongue typically weighs somewhere around 3-5 lb and will need the full three hours; it is done when a skewer passes through the thickest part with no resistance.
- LardingStrips of firm fat back or fat bacon are threaded through the surface with a larding needle at even intervals. Without a needle, lay bacon rashers over the top and tie them on with string; it is a workable substitute, though not the same thing as fat carried inside the meat.
- Button onionsSmall pickling or pearl onions, fried until browned first. Frozen peeled pearl onions work; brown them properly or they will taste raw against the port.
- Butter rolled in flourClose to a beurre manie: 1 1/2 oz butter rolled in as much flour as will coat it thickly, less than the equal weights of the classic mix. It goes in as a lump and thickens the liquor as it melts, so stir it through rather than dropping it in and leaving it.
- A glassful of portA wineglassful of the period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though the measure is genuinely imprecise; a small 1/4 to 1/3 cup is a fair reading. Added at the end so the wine keeps its fruit rather than cooking away.
- Heat level"Stew gently" means the barest surface movement, a bare simmer rather than a boil (the book gives no temperatures). A rolling boil at this stage toughens the meat and it goes dry and stringy despite the fat.
- ServingNine servings is optimistic for a 3 lb tongue unless the meal has several courses; six to eight is realistic. Carve in thin slices across the grain, starting at the tip, and strain the gravy if the flour has caught.
- CostThe "probable cost" of 4s to 6s is the book's estimate for the dish as made; whether it covers the tongue alone or the other ingredients too is not stated. Either way it was not a trifling sum against Victorian wages.
Ox tongue was one of the great economies of the Victorian larder: a single large cut that fed a table of eight or nine, kept well once cooked, and sliced cold for supper or breakfast for days afterwards. Salted tongue, either pressed into a mould and served cold or boiled plain, was common enough that a fresh tongue larded, braised and finished with port and lemon is the dressed-up version -- the treatment usually reserved for veal fricandeau applied to a cheaper joint. Larding, the threading of fat through lean meat with a needle, was a standard skill in a period when the cuts available to most cooks were tough and dry, and it appears in Cassell's as a matter of course. The Anglo-Portuguese port trade had made fortified wine an ordinary kitchen ingredient in Britain by the nineteenth century, and a glass of it in a brown gravy was less a luxury than a habit.