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Tongue, Hungarian
Put a fresh tongue on the fire with just cold water enough to cover it, and with it a carrot, an onion, a bay-leaf, a couple of slices of lemon, some black pepper, salt, and a little garlic. Let it simmer gently for about two hours till quite tender. Skin and trim it. Either serve it whole or cut into slices, and arranged in a ring with the following thick sauce in the centre. Strain the liquor which the tongue was cooked in (this should be reduced in the simmering to a mere gravy); brown a large table-spoonful of flour in a good-sized piece of butter; braise two or three cloves of garlic, and let them steam a little while in the browning; then add the strained gravy by degrees, stirring it quite smooth. Add a little lemon-juice or vinegar; and, whether the tongue be served whole or sliced, the sauce must be dished with it. If garlic be objected to, make a thick sauce of grated horse-radish, a carrot bruised fine, sorrel, capers, and a little wine. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley.
A straightforward braise of fresh beef tongue with a garlic-thickened pan sauce. Two things in the original need attention: the cooking time is short for a whole beef tongue, and the liquid cannot both cover the meat and reduce to "a mere gravy" unless you take a hand.
- Fresh means uncured"A fresh tongue" is an unsalted, unpickled tongue, as opposed to the salted or smoked tongues that dominated Victorian larders. If you buy a cured tongue, soak it overnight and expect the finished sauce to need no added salt. Butchers and Latin American or Eastern European markets carry fresh beef tongue; ask for lengua.
- Two hours is optimisticA whole beef tongue of 2.5 to 4 lb needs 2.5 to 3.5 hours at a bare simmer before the tip is tender to a skewer. Veal or lamb tongues, which the book's era also used, are done in 60 to 90 minutes. Cook to tenderness, not to the clock.
- Peel it hotThis is the hinge. The tough outer skin slips off in one or two sheets while the tongue is still steaming; let it cool and you will be cutting it away in shreds. Lift it out, hold it in a cloth, slit the skin lengthwise and pull. Trim the gristle and small bones at the root end.
- Getting the gravyA covered pot barely covering the meat will not reduce much in two hours. Strain the liquor after the tongue comes out and boil it hard in a wide pan until you have roughly a cup of concentrated stock. Skim the fat first or the sauce will break.
- "Braise" the garlicHere it means sweat gently in the butter, not brown. Brown the flour and butter to a light hazelnut roux, add the peeled cloves whole or crushed, let them soften a minute without colouring, then add the reduced stock a little at a time off the heat, whisking smooth. One tablespoon of flour to about an ounce of butter and a cup of stock gives only a light coating sauce; use rather less stock, or more flour, for the thick sauce the recipe asks for.
- The garlic-free alternativeThe second sauce is thickened by the grated root and carrot rather than by flour; sorrel and capers supply the acidity in place of the lemon juice. If sorrel is unavailable, spinach with extra lemon is a common substitute, though it lacks the sharpness.
- Yield and servingA 3 lb tongue serves six to eight, and slices thinly and cleanly once chilled under a light weight if you prefer to serve it cold. Sliced and ringed around the sauce, as here, it is a hot dish; plain boiled potatoes or buttered noodles take up the gravy.
The title's inverted form places this among a run of tongue recipes in an alphabetically arranged cookery book, reflecting how central the cut was to a nineteenth-century English household, cheap, feeding many, and as good cold as hot. What plausibly marks this one as Hungarian to a Victorian editor is the garlic, with the lemon or vinegar and the browned flour roux close behind; paprika, which later became the defining signal of Hungarian cooking in English books, is absent here. The instruction that the sauce may be made otherwise "if garlic be objected to" is the most period-specific line in the recipe: garlic was often treated in British domestic writing of the time as a foreign taste to be accommodated rather than assumed, and the alternative offered — horseradish, sorrel, capers, wine — substitutes a Northern European set of sharp flavours for a Central European one.