Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pigs' Tongues
Pigs' Tongues
Trim six or eight pigs' tongues neatly at the root, and rub them well with moist sugar. Leave them for twenty-four hours; then rub into them a powder, made of four ounces of common salt, two ounces of bay salt, and half an ounce of saltpetre. Turn them daily. They will be ready for use in ten days. If liked, they may be put into sausage-skins, dried, and smoked. Sufficient, one tongue for each person.
This is a dry cure, not a cooked dish, and it is the kind of recipe that has been overtaken by measured curing science. The notes below explain the vocabulary and then why the method cannot be followed as printed.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeHalf an ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate, about 14 g) rubbed into six or eight pigs' tongues is a very large quantity of nitrate relative to the weight of the meat, far above the levels permitted in modern cures, though in a surface rub of this kind not all of it is taken up. Recipes of this period generally handled saltpetre by the spoonful, as a colouring and keeping agent judged by eye; it is now weighed against the meat to the gram.
- No temperature anywhereThe tongues sit twenty-four hours in sugar and then ten days in the salt cure, and are then optionally dried and smoked, with no indication of how cold the curing room should be or how warm the smoke may get. Curing safety depends on holding the meat below about 40F while the salt penetrates; a cool larder in a January farmhouse and a modern kitchen are not the same environment.
- Cold smoking is the real hazardDrying and smoking below cooking temperature keeps the meat in the range where Clostridium botulinum can grow, which is exactly what a correctly measured nitrite cure exists to suppress. An unmeasured nitrate rub is not a substitute. If you want cured tongue, use a current recipe with weighed cure and stated temperatures.
- Bay saltBay salt is coarse sea salt made by solar evaporation in salt pans — nothing to do with bay leaves. It was valued for its coarse grain and slower dissolution; ordinary coarse sea salt is its descendant.
- Moist sugarThe unrefined brown sugar of the period, damp and slightly molasses-heavy, sold in grades from light to near-black. The initial sugar rub was thought to soften the meat's texture before the salt went on.
- Sausage-skinsCleaned hog casings, sold in salt by the hank. Stuffing cured tongues into skins before drying produced a compact rolled tongue for slicing.
- YieldOne tongue per person, as stated; a pig's tongue is small, and the recipe accordingly deals in batches of six or eight.
Pigs' tongues belong to the economy of the household pig, killed in the cold months and dealt with entirely: hams and bacon to the cure, fat to lard, offal and head to brawn and sausage, and the small offcuts — tongues, ears, cheeks — to whatever brine or dry cure was already going. Saltpetre had been used to keep and redden salted meat since at least the late Middle Ages, long before anyone understood that bacteria in the cure reduce nitrate to nitrite and that the nitrite is what does the work; the shift from eyeballed spoonfuls to weighed, standardised curing salts came only in the twentieth century, which is what dates this recipe more sharply than anything else on the page.