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Sheep's Tongues, Galantine Of
Put eight sheep's tongues (first cutting the gristle and small bones off) into a stewpan with just sufficient water to cover, add a sliced onion and a tablespoonful of salt. Boil slowly till perfectly tender, then peel them, and lay them one on the other in a round mould until it is full; add plenty of pepper and a little salt, and fill the crevices with slices of hard-boiled egg; add about half a cupful of good stock into which two tea-spoonfuls of gelatine have been dissolved and boiled. Place a plate over, then a weight, and when cold turn out and garnish with parsley. Probable cost, 3s.
A pressed cold meat in the brawn family, straightforward but dependent on two things: peeling the tongues while they are still hot, and pressing them hard enough that the set loaf will slice.
- Peel them hotThe skin lifts off a tongue cleanly only while it is steaming; once cold it welds on and has to be cut away with waste. Lift them out one at a time, hold with a cloth, slit the skin lengthwise and strip it, then trim the root end of gristle and any small bones the first trimming missed.
- SourcingSheep's (lamb's) tongues are a butcher's order rather than a supermarket item, though they turn up frozen in halal and Turkish shops. Eight weigh roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb raw and will fill a 1 1/2-pint round mould or a small loaf tin.
- "Boil slowly" means simmerHold the water at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, for 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours depending on size. A rolling boil toughens the muscle and clouds the liquid. They are ready when a skewer goes into the thickest part with no resistance.
- Keep the cooking liquorThe half cupful of "good stock" is best taken from the pan itself, strained and skimmed. It carries far more flavour than fresh stock and is already gelatinous from the tongues.
- The gelatineTwo teaspoons of powdered gelatine to half a cup of stock is a firm aspic, and deliberately so: it is glue between the layers rather than a jelly. One standard 1/4-oz sachet is about right. Soften it in cold stock first, then warm to dissolve; boiling gelatine hard weakens the set.
- Season past the point that seems rightCold pressed meat tastes flat. The "plenty of pepper" is not rhetorical, and it is worth tasting a little of the seasoned stock warm, where it should read as slightly over-salted.
- Pressing and chillingA plate that sits inside the rim of the mould, then two or three tins on top. Refrigerate at least 8 hours, better overnight. Turn out by dipping the mould briefly in hot water.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight as a cold cut. Slice thinly with a long sharp knife, wiped between cuts, and serve with mustard, pickled walnuts or a sharp salad. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
- The costThree shillings is the figure Cassell's gives for the whole dish, printed as a guide to what a household would spend on it.
Galantine properly means a boned, stuffed, poached meat set in its own jelly, and the word is generally traced to Old French galatine, a jellied sauce; by the nineteenth century English cookery books had stretched it to cover almost any cold meat pressed in aspic. This one is closer to a brawn: the same logic that turns a pig's head into head cheese, applied to cheap butcher's trimmings. Sheep's tongues were among the humbler kinds of offal, and pressing them into a mould converted a fiddly, bony item into something that could be turned out whole, garnished, and put on a supper or breakfast table looking like a made dish. Cassell's placed enormous weight on this kind of economy, and the printed "probable cost" attached to nearly every entry let a household judge at a glance whether a dish belonged to its means.