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Tongue, Pickled or Salted
Tongues are generally bought ready pickled, but as some cooks like to prepare their own tongues, two or three methods are here given. Of these the simplest is the following. Trim the root, and leave a little of the fat; place the tongue in a deep dish, cover with salt, and let it lie until the next day. Pour off the slime that will have come from it, and rub the meat well with a mixture made of half a pound of salt, half a pound of moist sugar, and two ounces of saltpetre. Turn and rub it every day for a week, renew the pickle, and turn and rub the tongue every day for another week, when it will be ready for use. Or, trim the root, put the tongue in a deep pan, cover with salt, and let it lie for twenty-four hours. Drain off the slime, and rub it with a mixture made as follows. Take three pounds of common salt, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, three ounces of saltpetre, with a quarter of an ounce each of cloves, mace, and pepper, two table-spoonfuls of mixed herbs finely chopped--thyme, marjoram, bay-leaves, winter savory, and basil. Pound these ingredients in a mortar, and mix them thoroughly. Rub this mixture into the tongue, and turn and rub it every day for twelve days or a fortnight, when it will be ready for use. Or let the tongue lie in salt for twenty-four hours as above. Rub into it a mixture made with half a pound of common salt, half an ounce of bay salt, half an ounce of saltpetre, and a quarter of a pound of moist sugar. Turn and rub it every day for three weeks for a small tongue, four weeks for a large one. Or, make a pickle by boiling a pound of salt, a pound of moist sugar, two ounces of saltpetre, and three ounces of sal prunella in a gallon of water for twenty minutes. Let the brine get cold, then put the tongue in it, and let it lie for a fortnight, and lay a small board on the top to keep the meat under the liquor. This pickle may be used several times if it is boiled occasionally. Tongues are always best when used straight out of the pickle. When this is not convenient, however, they should be taken out, rubbed dry, hung up to keep, and smoked, if liked.
This is a curing procedure rather than a cooking one, and it is the kind of old recipe that cannot be followed safely today. The notes below explain the archaic terms and then why the method itself is out of range.
- Saltpetre is not measured against the meatEvery variant here gives a fixed weight of saltpetre — from half an ounce to three ounces — with no indication of how heavy the tongue is. Nitrate and nitrite in cured meat are now controlled in parts per million against the weight of the meat, because the margin between an effective cure and a harmful dose is narrow. A recipe that says "a tongue" and "three ounces of saltpetre" gives no way to land inside that margin.
- Sal prunellaThe fourth pickle calls for three ounces of sal prunella, which is potassium nitrate that has been fused and cast into cakes — so that brine carries five ounces of nitrate compounds in total. It is not sold as a food ingredient now, and its presence here compounds the dosing problem rather than solving it.
- No temperature anywhereThe tongue sits in salt or brine for two to four weeks with no stated temperature. Victorian larders ran cold and damp; a modern kitchen does not. Curing meat for weeks at an unspecified temperature is precisely the condition that allows spoilage organisms, and in a low-oxygen brine Clostridium botulinum, to establish before the salt has penetrated the centre of a dense muscle.
- A tongue is the worst case for slow penetrationTongue is thick, tightly grained and sheathed in a tough skin, so cure moves inward slowly. The recipe judges readiness purely by elapsed days — twelve days, a fortnight, three weeks for a small tongue — with no check on whether the core has taken salt at all.
- The reused brine"This pickle may be used several times if it is boiled occasionally" is the sort of instruction that made sense when brine tubs were in constant service and boiling was the only available control. Salt concentration and nitrate level both fall with each use, and neither is measured here, so successive tongues are cured in progressively weaker liquor.
- Smoking, unspecifiedThe closing line adds smoking as an optional afterthought, with no temperature, duration or method. Cold-smoking cured meat is a controlled process; treated as a garnish to an already unquantified cure, it adds another uncontrolled variable.
- Terms, for reading rather than for useMoist sugar is unrefined light brown sugar. Bay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt. A fortnight is two weeks. Mixed herbs here means the garden set the book lists — thyme, marjoram, bay, winter savory, basil — chopped, not a dried blend.
- If you want salt tongueBuy it ready cured, as the recipe itself notes most cooks did, or work from a current curing recipe that specifies cure weight as a percentage of meat weight and a refrigerated holding temperature.
Cassell's opens by admitting that tongues were "generally bought ready pickled" — salting was trade work, done by butchers and by the large pickling firms, and the four methods here are offered as a courtesy to cooks who preferred to do their own. Pickled ox tongue was a fixture of the Victorian and Edwardian cold table: pressed into a round mould, glazed, and sliced thin for luncheon, supper or the sideboard at a ball, where it kept and carved better than hot meat. The saltpetre is what makes it recognisable, since nitrate is the agent that fixes cured meat's pink colour instead of the grey-brown of plain salt beef; its use in curing long predates any understanding of why it worked, and the shift from eyeballed ounces to regulated parts per million belongs to the twentieth century, not to this book. The herb-and-spice variant, with cloves, mace, pepper and a handful of garden herbs pounded into the salt, belongs to the older English habit of a spiced and sugared cure, closer to the spiced cures of the seventeenth century than to the plain brines that industrial curing settled on.