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Tongue, Beef
If dried, a salted tongue must be soaked for some hours before it is dressed. It must then be put into cold water and gently brought to the boiling point; then, after the surface of the water has been cleared from scum, the saucepan must be removed from the fire only so far as to reduce the boiling to a gentle simmering. If dried, a tongue will require quite four hours' boiling; if simply salted, only three hours. Whilst it is hot, the outer skin must be peeled off, and the tongue may be sent to table either glazed or plain. The usual accompaniment to boiled tongue is boiled turnips.
A method rather than a formula: the recipe assumes you have bought a cured tongue from a butcher and know what one weighs. A few things need translating.
- What you are buyingA whole beef tongue runs 3-4 lb. "Salted" means wet-cured in brine and sold damp; "dried" means it has been salted and then hung, and is stiff and dark. Dried tongue is now rare outside specialist butchers, so most cooks will be working with the brined kind and the three-hour figure.
- The soak"Some hours" for a dried tongue is likely to mean a long soak, up to overnight, in one or more changes of cold water. A brined tongue from a modern butcher is often less salty than a Victorian one, so a few hours may be enough; less again if the butcher tells you the cure is light.
- The hinge: never let it boilBringing it gently to the boil and then dropping straight back to a bare simmer is the whole technique. A rolling boil tightens the muscle and leaves the tongue stringy and dry no matter how long it cooks. You want the surface barely trembling, around 180-190F.
- Time is a guide, a skewer is the testThree to four hours suits a large tongue, but check from about two and a half. A skewer should slide into the thickest part at the root with no resistance, and the small bones near the base should pull free cleanly.
- Peel it hotThis is not optional. The rough outer skin lifts off in sheets while the tongue is too hot to hold comfortably; let it cool and it welds on. Lift it out, hold it with a cloth, slit the skin along the underside and strip it, then trim the gristle and any small bones at the root.
- Glazed, plain, or pressed"Glazed" means brushed with reduced meat stock set to a syrupy coat, not a sugar glaze. The other Victorian finish, not mentioned here, is to curl the peeled tongue into a deep tin or cake pan, weight it, and chill overnight for a solid round that slices thin for cold meat.
- Yield and servingA 3-4 lb tongue will serve six to eight hot, more when pressed and sliced thin for the cold table. Boiled turnips are the accompaniment the recipe names; mustard, horseradish or a caper sauce are equally at home.
- Keep the liquorThe cooking water is salty but well flavoured. Taste it before using it as a base for soup or for cooking the turnips, and dilute it if the cure was heavy.
Tongue occupies a good deal of space in Victorian cookery books because it was a cheap cut that behaved like an expensive one: cured, boiled, skinned and pressed, it produced a large, handsome, uniformly lean round that carved into perfect slices and kept for days in a cold larder. That made it a staple of the cold table, the breakfast sideboard, the picnic hamper and the supper laid out after an evening party, all situations where a dish had to look composed and be served without a cook standing over it. The distinction the recipe draws between "salted" and "dried" reflects two stages of the same preservation trade: brining, and then the further drying that let a tongue travel and keep through a season. The technique itself -- long soak, slow simmer, peel while hot -- applies to any cured tongue regardless of what is done with it afterwards.