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Tongue, Fresh Ox
Put the tongue on the fire in cold water, simmer slowly till tender, and then remove the skin. Melt two ounces of butter in a stewpan; dust in a table-spoonful of flour and as much grated bread as the butter will take up, and brown. Mince small a few rashers of bacon, do the same with an onion, and add them to the sauce with the juice of a lemon and a slice of its peel. Thin the sauce with a little broth or water in which the tongue was boiled. Lay in the tongue, sprinkle with salt, cover, and let it simmer slowly for an hour.
A fresh (unsalted, uncured) ox tongue braised in a browned bacon-and-breadcrumb sauce. The recipe assumes you know how long a tongue takes and how to handle it hot, which is where most of the work lies.
- The hinge: skin it while it is hotThe thick outer skin peels away cleanly only while the tongue is steaming; once it cools it grips and has to be cut off in pieces, taking meat with it. Lift it straight from the pot, hold it in a towel, slit the skin along the underside and strip it. Trim the gristle, small bones and fat at the root end at the same time.
- "Simmer slowly till tender" is 3 to 4 hoursA fresh ox tongue of 3-4 lb needs roughly three hours at a bare shiver, longer for a big one. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance. The subsequent hour in the sauce is for flavour, not for tenderising.
- Fresh, not pickledMost ox tongue sold today is brined or ready-cooked. This recipe wants an unsalted one, which usually means ordering from a butcher. If you can only get a cured tongue, soak it overnight and taste the cooking liquid before you use any of it in the sauce, and add no salt at the end.
- StewpanA heavy, straight-sided pan with a lid: a Dutch oven or lidded casserole is the equivalent. It needs to be long enough to hold the tongue lying flat and take a lid.
- Grated breadFresh crumbs from a stale white loaf, not dry packaged breadcrumbs, which are far more absorbent. "As much as the butter will take up" is about 2-3 tablespoons alongside the flour; the mixture should look like damp sand, not a paste.
- RashersSlices of bacon; the recipe does not specify the cut or whether it is smoked, and unsmoked streaky is one reasonable choice. Two or three, finely chopped, is a plausible reading of "a few." Add them with the onion and let both cook in the browned roux before any liquid goes in.
- Lemon peelPare a strip with a peeler so it carries no white pith, which turns bitter over an hour of simmering. Fish it out before serving.
- Salt lastThe bacon and the reduced cooking broth both season the sauce. Sprinkle sparingly at the point the recipe says, then correct at the end.
- Serving and yieldA 3-4 lb tongue serves eight to ten. Carve across the grain in thin slices, starting from the tip, and spoon the sauce over. Mashed potato or plain boiled root vegetables take the sauce well.
Tongue was one of the great economy meats of the nineteenth-century British kitchen: cheap, large, and capable of feeding a household hot on the day and cold for days after. Cassell's gives several tongue entries side by side, and the distinction it draws between fresh and salted is the important one. Salting and pressing tongue in a mould was the more familiar treatment, producing the pink, close-grained slab of the cold sideboard; a fresh tongue simmered and then braised in a brown sauce, as here, is a hot dinner dish in the older stewed-meat tradition, closer to French langue de boeuf sauce piquante than to the supper table. The sauce itself is thickened with both flour and grated bread, a habit inherited from earlier English cookery, where crumbs did the work now given entirely to a roux; the lemon juice and peel supply the sharpness that a long-simmered fatty cut needs. Offal of this kind fell out of everyday British cooking through the twentieth century, and tongue is now largely a butcher's special order rather than a weekly purchase.