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Sheep's Tongues, Cured
Put fresh tongues into a pickle such as is used for beef and ox-tongues, and let them remain for four days. Take them up, wash them, put them into boiling water, and simmer gently until done enough. Skin them, let them get cold, split them in halves without dividing them, and serve cold for breakfast. Mustard or tartar sauce may be served with them. If there is no beef pickle at hand, wash the tongues, and rub into each one a table-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of sugar, and a tea-spoonful of yinegar. Turn and rub them with the pickle every day for four days, then proceed as before. Time to boil the tongues, two hours. Probable cost, 4d. each. Sufficient, one tongue for one person.
A straightforward salt cure followed by a long gentle simmer. Two details matter most: keep the tongues cold for the four curing days, and skin them the moment they come out of the pot.
- Skin them hotThe tough outer membrane peels away cleanly while the tongue is still steaming and grips hard once it cools. The recipe already places skinning before cooling, so do it as soon as the tongues can be handled.
- Cure in the refrigeratorA Victorian larder would have been cooler than a modern kitchen, though not reliably cold. Rub the tongues, put them in a covered non-reactive dish, and keep them at refrigerator temperature for the four days, turning daily as directed.
- "Pickle such as is used for beef"A cross-reference to the book's brine for salt beef and ox tongue, which in this period would commonly have contained saltpetre for colour. The fallback dry rub given here — a tablespoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of vinegar per tongue — has no curing salt, so the meat will cook to a pale grey-brown rather than the pink of shop-bought tongue. That is normal for this version.
- "Yinegar"A typesetter's slip for vinegar.
- Simmer, do not boilTongue is dense muscle and a rolling boil tightens it. Bring the water up, then hold it at a bare tremble. "Done enough" means a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance.
- TimingTwo hours suits a full-sized sheep's tongue; lamb tongues from a modern butcher are often smaller and may be tender in 75 to 90 minutes. Test rather than trust the clock.
- "Split them in halves without dividing them"Butterfly each tongue lengthwise, leaving it hinged at one edge so it opens flat. Press the opened tongues under a weighted plate as they chill for neater slices.
- SourcingLamb or sheep tongues are an order-ahead item at a butcher rather than a supermarket line. They are sold ungraded and usually still membrane-on, which is what this recipe assumes.
- Tartar sauce, period senseIn this period the name means a mayonnaise sharpened with mustard, vinegar and chopped capers or gherkins — a cold sauce for meat, not the fish-shop version.
- Yield and costOne tongue per person, as stated. The "4d. each" is a 19th-century price and tells you only how cheap this cut once was.
Cassell's treats sheep's tongues as a breakfast dish, and that placement is the whole point: cold cured meats, sliced thin and eaten early with mustard, were a fixture of the Victorian middle-class sideboard, where the previous day's boiling supplied the next morning's plate. Tongue was the aristocrat of the offal counter in its ox form — pressed ox tongue was a party dish, moulded and glazed — while the sheep's tongue was its small, cheap cousin, four for the price of nothing much and sold by the butcher along with hearts, skirts and lights. The technique here is salting rather than true preservation: four days in a rub is long enough to season the meat through and firm its texture, but not to keep it, which is why the recipe moves straight from the pickle to the pot. Saltpetre, mentioned only by implication through the cross-reference to the beef pickle, was what gave commercially cured tongue the rosy colour that home cooks working from the shorter rub had to do without.