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OX TONGUE, POTTED WHOLE (for a Picnic or Supper)
Take an ox tongue out of pickle and wash it well. If the root has not been cut away, take off the rough parts. Put half a pound of fat bacon at the bottom of a deep round pan just large enough for the purpose, and then a pound of rump-steak; upon these place the tongue, which has been rolled and bound with tape. Cover it with a cow-heel, boiled and boned, another slice of steak and bacon, and season the whole with a quarter of a tea-spoonful of powdered ginger, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of powdered cloves, two tea-spoonfuls of white pepper, and a bay-leaf. Add two onions and a carrot, sliced, a bunch of sweet herbs, and pour over the whole a quart of water, two glassfuls of sherry, and half a pint of mild ale. Cover the pan closely, and place it in a moderate oven. When the tongue is sufficiently cooked, take it out, put over the meat a thin board with a weight upon it, and leave it until the following day. Place it on a dish, and glaze neatly before serving. If wished, part of the tongue can be eaten hot, and the remainder afterwards pressed. Time, three hours and a half to bake the meat. Probable cost, 8s. Sufficient for eighteen or twenty persons.
A Victorian cold-table centrepiece: a brined tongue braised in a sealed pot with gelatinous cuts, then pressed overnight. Most of the work is in the sourcing and the pressing, not the cooking.
- Skin it hotThe one step the original assumes and never states. The rough outer skin of the tongue peels away cleanly only while the meat is still hot from the oven; let it cool and it will cling and tear. Peel, trim the gristle at the root, then roll and press.
- "Out of pickle"This means a tongue already brine-cured by the butcher, not a fresh one. Cured tongue is still sold, usually vacuum-packed and often already skinned; soak it in cold water for several hours, changing the water once, if it tastes very salty at the root end. A fresh tongue will need curing first and is a different recipe.
- Cow-heelBoiled and boned cow-heel is a gelatine supplier, there to set the pressed loaf and give the glaze its body. Order it from a halal or West Indian butcher, or substitute two split pig's trotters or a calf's foot. Without it the pressed tongue will hold together less firmly and the glaze will be slacker.
- Oven heatA 'moderate oven' in Victorian cookery books, which give no temperatures, is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350F/180C, but this is a covered pot of liquid and does better at 300-325F/150-160C for the three and a half hours. Judge by feel rather than clock: a skewer should slide into the thickest part with no resistance, which for a large tongue can take four hours or more.
- The liquidsA quart is 40 fl oz imperial, a shade over 1.1 litres; half a pint of mild ale is 10 fl oz/280 ml. "Two glassfuls" of sherry means wine glasses of the day, roughly 2 fl oz each, so about 120 ml total. Mild ale was a lightly hopped, faintly sweet brown beer; a modern mild, brown ale or a low-bitterness bitter is closer than anything hoppy.
- Rolling and bindingTape means cotton kitchen tape or string. Curl the tongue back on itself into a tight round and tie it firmly before it goes into the pot, or press it into a straight-sided tin or a cake tin once cooked and skinned; either gives the neat cross-section this dish is after.
- Pressing, and wherePress under a board and a weight, but do it in the refrigerator rather than a cold larder. A large piece of cooked meat left weighted at room temperature overnight sits in the range where bacteria multiply. Twelve hours under a few kilos is enough.
- GlazingThe glaze is not sugar. Strain and degrease the braising liquid, boil it hard until it is syrupy and sets tacky on a cold spoon, then brush it over the chilled tongue in two or three thin coats. The cow-heel gelatine does the setting; a leaf of gelatine can be added if the reduction stays slack.
- Yield and costEighteen to twenty portions is realistic only as thin slices on a cold buffet alongside other dishes. The 8s. is a Victorian price for a substantial quantity of tongue, steak, bacon and cow-heel, which suggests a party outlay rather than everyday food.
Pressed and potted tongue was one of the fixed points of the Victorian cold table, the food of picnics, supper trays, shooting lunches and railway hampers, because it keeps, travels, carves cleanly and looks handsome under its dark glaze. Ox tongue reached the kitchen already pickled in a brine that usually included saltpetre, which is why the cooked meat is pink rather than grey; the cure was a preserving measure long before it was a cosmetic one. The supporting cast here is largely there for gelatine: the cow-heel, fat bacon and rump-steak are cooked to exhaustion and their juices reduced to the glaze, with the tongue the piece the recipe is concerned to present, a pattern common in nineteenth-century recipes where cheap collagen-rich cuts were treated as ingredients rather than dishes. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households with a cook and a cold larder, gives cost and number served for exactly this sort of set-piece, and the note that part may be eaten hot and the rest pressed is a reminder that the same joint was expected to appear at two meals.