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Udder, Beef
Beef udder may be gently simmered in broth or water, then sliced, and served with onion or tomato sauce. If liked, it may be put in salt for a couple of days before being boiled. Salted udder should be eaten cold, and vinegar and oil should be sent to table with it.
A terse entry for an organ meat that has all but vanished from English-speaking kitchens. The method is sound, but almost everything about sourcing, timing and finishing is left unsaid.
- SourcingMammary tissue is not passed for human food under US federal inspection, so it will not appear at an American butcher counter. It is still sold in Italy (tettina or tetina di vacca) and occasionally in France (tétine), usually already blanched or cooked; ask a halal or ethnic butcher elsewhere.
- The hinge: long, low simmeringUdder is fat threaded through tough connective tissue and glandular material. "Gently simmered" is doing a lot of work here: it needs 2 to 3 hours at a bare tremble, never a rolling boil, until a skewer meets no resistance. Boiled hard, the fat renders out and the tissue turns to rubber.
- Preparation before it goes in the potRinse thoroughly, trim any surface skin and hard ducts, and give it a preliminary blanch of ten minutes in fresh water, then discard that water. The book assumes the cook knows this; it makes a real difference to the smell of the finished dish.
- Slicing and pressingCut in slices no more than a quarter-inch thick, across the grain. For the cold version, pressing the cooked udder between two plates with a weight on top overnight in the refrigerator will firm it into something sliceable and slightly translucent.
- "Put in salt"Probably a dry salting rather than a measured brine, though the book does not say; in a period larder it would have meant a cold stone room. Do it in the refrigerator, use enough salt to coat every surface generously, and rinse and soak an hour before cooking or the result will be inedibly salty.
- The saucesOnion sauce in this period generally means a white sauce built on softened onions rather than a brown gravy; tomato sauce would have been a cooked puree, usually strained. Both cut the richness, which is the point -- udder is very fatty.
- Vinegar and oil at tableFor the cold salted version, this is effectively a serve-yourself vinaigrette, in the manner of cold tongue or brawn. A sharp vinegar and a plain oil, with pepper, suits it.
- YieldA whole udder is large — several pounds. Reckon a 2 lb piece as serving four to six as a first course, and expect noticeable shrinkage during the simmer.
Udder belongs to the older, thoroughgoing use of the carcass that Victorian and Edwardian household manuals still took for granted, alongside palate, melt, lights and cheek. Cassell's gives it a few lines in the same encyclopaedic spirit that it gives sirloin: a cook might meet it, so a cook should know what to do with it. In Britain it was sometimes sold cooked and pressed as a cheap sandwich meat, and it is often said to have been passed off as, or sold alongside, tripe. The dish outlived its English currency in Italy, where tettina di vacca is still simmered, pressed and sliced thin for antipasti in Emilia and Tuscany, and in France, where tétine de vache had a similar cold-cut life. Its disappearance from Anglo-American cooking has less to do with taste than with inspection law and the twentieth-century retreat from offal generally.