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Pickle for Tongues
Rub a handful of salt and another of moist sugar over the tongues, and lay them on a dish in a cool place. Turn and rub them every day for four days. On the fourth day, put a quart of water and a quart of porter into a saucepan with four ounces of saltpetre, two pounds of bay salt, and two pounds of common salt. Bring the liquid to a boil, and skim thoroughly. Put the tongues in a deep pan, and pour the pickle over them while it is hot, and see that they are perfectly covered with it. At the end of eight days they will be fit for use. The pickle should remain on the fire until it boils.
This is a wet cure for ox tongue from the era before refrigeration or any measured control of nitrate. It is readable as a historical document, but it is not a procedure to follow.
- The saltpetre is far out of modern rangeFour ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in two quarts of liquid is an enormous nitrate load by current standards, and the recipe never states how much meat it is meant to cover, so there is no dose at all — only a bucket of brine and however many tongues fit the pan. Modern curing salts are used at strictly limited parts-per-million precisely because nitrate and nitrite are toxic in quantity.
- Hot brine onto raw meatPouring boiling pickle over tongues in a deep pan takes the whole mass slowly through the temperature band where bacteria multiply fastest, and then holds it there while it cools. Modern curing brines are chilled before the meat goes in, for exactly this reason.
- "A cool place" is not a temperatureThe recipe directs that the tongues be dry-salted in "a cool place" for four days, and says nothing at all about where the pan of pickle should stand for the following eight. It gives no number, and a modern kitchen has no equivalent room. Curing at unmeasured strength and unmeasured temperature is among the conditions associated with the risk of Clostridium botulinum in cured meats.
- Nothing here is cookedThe tongues are called "fit for use" after eight days in brine, which in a pickle recipe most likely means ready to be taken out and boiled; no cooking step is given on this page, and nothing in the process brings the meat to a safe internal temperature. Salt cure alone, at unmeasured strength and unmeasured temperature, is not a substitute for heat.
- Ingredients that have changedBay salt was coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, grey and mineral-heavy, and had a different grain and density from the "common salt" listed beside it; the two are not interchangeable by volume with modern table or kosher salt. Porter of this period is generally reckoned to have been darker and more heavily hopped than much of what is sold under the name today.
- If you want brined tongueUse a current recipe with a weighed cure percentage, a stated nitrite product and a refrigerated cure, followed by cooking to temperature.
Salt beef and pickled tongue were staples of the Victorian larder rather than delicacies: a tongue took the cure well, kept for weeks, and sliced cold for breakfast, supper trays and picnic hampers. Saltpetre earned its place in such brines because nitrate, converted by bacteria in the cure, fixes the pink colour and characteristic tang of cured meat — an effect cooks of the period worked with without knowing its chemistry. The four days of dry rubbing before the wet pickle is the older technique showing through: salt and sugar draw out surface moisture and start the cure before the brine takes over, a sequence still recognisable in modern two-stage cures, though now with everything weighed and everything cold.