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Tongue, Rolled
Take a large ox-tongue. If dry, soak it in plenty of cold water before dressing it; if fresh from the pickle, soak it for two or three hours only. Put it into a large stewpan with plenty of cold water and a bunch of savoury herbs; bring it slowly to the boil, remove the scum as it rises, and simmer gently until tender. Take off the skin--which will come off easily if the tongue is sufficiently boiled--trim the roots, remove the bones, and press the tongue, fat inwards, into a round tin just large enough to hold it. Put a weighted dish upon it, and let it remain until cold. Turn it out, glaze it, or tie a napkin neatly round it, and garnish with tufts of parsley. Time, a large smoked tongue, four hours and a half; a small smoked tongue, three hours; a large unsmoked tongue, three hours and a half; a small one, two hours to two hours and a half. Probable cost, 4s. 6d. to 6s. Sufficient for a breakfast, supper, or luncheon dish.
A straightforward large-format preparation, but two things decide the outcome: peeling the skin while the tongue is still hot, and pressing it under real weight until completely cold.
- Peel it hotThe skin lifts off cleanly only while the tongue is steaming; once it cools the membrane grips and you will tear the meat pulling at it. Lift it straight from the liquor, hold it in a cloth, slit the skin lengthwise and strip it away, then trim the gristle, small bones and glands at the root end.
- Buying the tongueAn ox tongue runs 3-5 lb fresh. "Fresh from the pickle" means brined by the butcher, which is how much of the tongue sold today is prepared; "dry" means heavily salted or smoked and genuinely wants overnight soaking in several changes of cold water. Unbrined tongue is grey-brown when cooked rather than pink, which is a curing effect, not a fault.
- Simmer, never boilA rolling boil toughens the muscle and clouds the liquor. Keep the surface barely trembling and skim in the first fifteen minutes, when most of the scum rises.
- Judging doneness over the stated timesThe book's two to four and a half hours are a reasonable guide, but test rather than time: a skewer should slide into the thickest part with no resistance, and the tip of the skin should already be lifting. Older, larger tongues can want longer than the maximum given.
- The pressing tinUse a deep round cake tin or a small souffle dish just wide enough to take the curled tongue, thick end coiled around the tip, fat side inward. Set a plate on top and weight it with tins or a foil-wrapped brick, and refrigerate overnight. Under-weighting gives a slice that falls apart.
- GlazingVictorian glaze is meat glaze - the cooking liquor from an unsalted tongue reduced to a syrup that sets tacky - warmed to brushing consistency and painted over the cold tongue. If the tongue was brined, the liquor is far too salty to reduce; use a lightly set aspic or simply the napkin-and-parsley presentation the recipe offers as the alternative.
- Yield and servingA 4 lb pressed tongue gives roughly twelve to sixteen servings. Slice it very thin on a cold joint, cut across the grain, and serve with mustard, pickled walnuts or a sharp salad. It keeps three or four days wrapped in the refrigerator.
- Cost note4s. 6d. to 6s. was a substantial outlay for a household dish - tongue was a valued cut, not the offal bargain it later became.
Pressed tongue belongs to the Victorian cold table: the sideboard of joints, raised pies and moulded meats that carried breakfast, luncheon and late supper without any further cooking, which is why Cassell's files it as a dish "sufficient for a breakfast, supper, or luncheon" rather than a dinner course. Ox tongue was cured in salt and saltpetre by butchers and grocers as a matter of course, the saltpetre giving the characteristic pink; smoked tongues travelled and kept, and imported and tinned ones were a staple of the British grocery trade in the later nineteenth century. The round pressing tin, sold specifically for the purpose, produced the compact drum that slices into neat rounds - a shape so associated with the dish that it survived into twentieth-century delicatessen tongue long after most households stopped boiling their own.