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Tongue, Roasted
Parboil a tongue that has been salted about ten days; roast, baste at first with red wine, and lastly with butter. Serve with a rich gravy and sweet sauce.
A terse Victorian instruction that assumes two things a modern cook may not have: a tongue already sitting in brine, and a spit in front of a fire. Both are easily translated.
- The hinge: peel while hotThe tough outer skin of a tongue comes away cleanly only in the few minutes after parboiling, while the meat is still steaming. Let it cool in its skin and you will be paring it off in shreds.
- "Salted about ten days"This means a corned or pickled tongue, cured in brine. Butchers and some supermarkets still sell them ready-cured; if you brine your own, use a current recipe with weighed salt and curing salt rather than working from this line, which gives no quantities at all.
- Size and soakingA whole beef tongue runs 3-4 lb; veal and lamb tongues are much smaller and cook proportionally faster. Soak a cured tongue in cold water for several hours, changing the water once, or the finished roast will be aggressively salty.
- ParboilingSimmer a beef tongue gently, never at a rolling boil, for about 3 hours, until a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest part and the skin lifts at the tip. Undercooking here cannot be fixed in the oven.
- Oven in place of spitThe recipe gives no oven and no heat level. As a modern substitute, roast at 350F; forty-five minutes to an hour is enough, since the meat is already cooked and the oven is only glazing and browning it.
- The two bastesRed wine first sets a dark, faintly acidic glaze; butter at the end gives colour and gloss. Butter applied early over a long roast simply burns, which may explain why it comes last here.
- "Sweet sauce"In this period the phrase generally points to a sweet or fruit accompaniment served with meat; redcurrant jelly loosened with a little of the pan juices, or a cherry or damson sauce, would all suit. The recipe names none of them. The rich gravy is the pan drippings deglazed with stock.
- ServingCarve in thin slices across the grain, starting at the tip and angling more steeply toward the thick root end. A whole beef tongue serves 6 to 8.
Tongue was a standard item of the nineteenth-century larder rather than a curiosity: it cured well, kept well, and could be served hot as a roast, cold and pressed for the sideboard, or potted. The brevity of the instruction suggests a reader assumed to know already that a salted tongue must first be boiled tender and skinned. The pairing of a rich brown gravy with a sweet fruit sauce belongs to a long English habit, still visible in redcurrant jelly with lamb and applesauce with pork, of setting something sharp and sugary against fatty or heavily salted meat. Basting with red wine before butter is associated with spit cookery, where liquid could be applied repeatedly to a turning joint without pooling and burning.