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Tongue, Stewed
Wash a tongue, and trim away the coarser parts of the root. Rub it well with common salt and a small quantity of saltpetre, let it lie for a week, and turn and rub it every day. Boil in the usual way until it is tender. Pull off the skin, and put the tongue again into the stewpan with part of the strained liquor in which it was boiled, a pint of strong stock, a bunch of sweet herbs, two bay-leaves, and five or six outer sticks of celery. Let it simmer gently for an hour. Lift out the herbs and the celery, and season the gravy with a salt-spoonful of white pepper, a little salt if necessary, two pounded cloves, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a table-spoonful of lemon or walnut pickle, and a glassful of white wine, and thicken with flour and butter. Serve the tongue on a hot dish. Pour the sauce over it, and send stewed mushrooms to table with it. If any gravy is left, it may be used advantageously for stews. Time, one hour to stew the tongue after it is peeled. Probable cost, tongue, 4s. 6d. to 6s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
The stewing and saucing here are sound Victorian cookery, but the recipe opens with a week-long dry cure built on unmeasured saltpetre, and that first step cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the problem and gloss the older terms.
- The saltpetre is the reason to stop"A small quantity of saltpetre" is not a quantity. Potassium nitrate in a cure is regulated by weight against the weight of the meat, because too little leaves the meat unprotected through a week at cellar temperature and too much is a genuine toxicity risk. No amount of judgement substitutes for a measured figure here.
- A week at unstated temperatureThe tongue is to lie in salt for seven days, turned daily, with no temperature given. Victorian larders were generally cold; a modern kitchen counter is not. Meat held for days in the danger zone is a spoilage risk, and inadequate nitrate is the reason modern cures specify it by weight.
- Use a current cure recipe insteadIf you want salt tongue, follow a modern brine or dry-cure formula that specifies curing salt by percentage of meat weight and a refrigerated holding temperature. Do not scale or guess from this text.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. A thin, dark, salty liquor of salted mushrooms, closer to a mushroom soy or Worcestershire in function. Still sold by British specialists, and a splash of mushroom soy is the nearest common substitute.
- Walnut pickleThe spiced vinegar from a jar of pickled green walnuts, used as a sharp, tannic seasoning. The recipe treats lemon and walnut pickle as interchangeable, which tells you it wants acid more than any particular flavour.
- A glassful of white wineIn Victorian cookery books a wine glass runs about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup, not a modern restaurant pour.
- Salt-spoonfulThe smallest spoon in a Victorian service, about a quarter of a teaspoon.
- Cost and yieldFour shillings and sixpence to six shillings was a substantial outlay for a single joint in the 1870s and 80s. The dish is given as serving five or six.
Ox tongue was a fixture of the Victorian table in a way it no longer is: cheap relative to prime cuts, large enough to feed a party, and improved rather than harmed by salting, which made it useful to households buying meat in quantity from a butcher. Tongue was very commonly served cold, cured and pressed into a round mould with its own gelatinous liquor, to be sliced for breakfast, supper or the cold sideboard. This recipe is the hot alternative, and its sauce shows a familiar Victorian flavour kit for reheated boiled meat: strong stock, sweet herbs, bay, celery, cloves, and two bottled sharpeners — mushroom ketchup and walnut pickle — that supplied the savoury depth a modern cook would reach for in soy or Worcestershire. The page assumes as a matter of course that the cook will cure the tongue herself, an assumption that dates it more sharply than any of its ingredients.