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Veal Tongue, to Preserve
Trim the tongue, and put it into boiling water for a quarter of an hour. Drain and dry it, take off the skin, and rub the tongue thoroughly with salt which has been mixed with a small proportion of saltpetre and a few savoury herbs chopped small. Put it into an earthen jar, sprinkle a handful of chopped herbs upon it, and lay a weight upon it to keep it under the brine. Keep it in a cool, well-ventilated place, and turn and rub it every day for ten days. Drain and dry it, put it in a large polony-skin properly cleansed, and tie it securely at both ends. If it is to be smoked, hang it over a small fire of juniper wood, upon which aromatic herbs are occasionally thrown.
This is a dry-cure-and-cold-smoke procedure for a whole veal tongue, written for a household with a cold larder and a working knowledge of curing that the text assumes rather than states. It cannot be followed safely today, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
- Saltpetre with no quantity"Salt which has been mixed with a small proportion of saltpetre" is the whole of the specification. Potassium nitrate works largely by being reduced to nitrite, and it has to be measured to be relied on, while excess nitrate is itself a hazard; a curing recipe that gives no weight of salt, no weight of nitrate and no weight of meat gives the cook no way to land inside a safe range.
- No temperature anywhere"A cool, well-ventilated place" would have meant an unheated larder or cellar, considerably colder than a modern kitchen, but the recipe never gives a figure. A cure run at ambient household temperature is a ten-day incubation rather than a preservation.
- The tongue is never cooked throughFifteen minutes in boiling water loosens the skin on a whole tongue; it does not bring the interior to a safe temperature. Everything after that point is curing and smoking, so the finished article depends entirely on the cure for safety.
- Cold smoking over an open fireHanging the stuffed skin "over a small fire of juniper wood" is cold or warm smoking at an uncontrolled temperature, quite possibly within the range in which bacteria multiply. Smoke flavours and dries the surface; it does not sterilise the interior of a stuffed casing.
- The polony skinA polony skin is a large casing, usually an ox or beef casing, of the kind used for the pale boiling sausage sold as polony. Stuffing the cured tongue into a casing creates exactly the anaerobic interior that nitrate curing is meant to protect, which is why the missing measurements matter so much here rather than merely being untidy.
- If you want cured tongueUse a current recipe from a source that specifies weights of salt and nitrite as a percentage of meat weight, along with cure temperature and duration, or buy it ready-cured. Read this page as a record of method, not as instructions.
Tongue was one of the standard preserved meats of the nineteenth-century larder: cheap, keeping well once cured, and easy to serve cold in slices for breakfast or supper, which is why the book treats it as a matter of routine household provisioning rather than a special dish. Pressing the meat under a weight to keep it beneath its own drawn-out brine, then turning and rubbing it daily, is a dry-cure practice described in English cookery books of the period, and the finishing touch here, stuffing the cured tongue into a wide polony casing, has parallels in continental charcuterie, where cured tongue is worked into large sausages such as the German Zungenwurst. Juniper-wood smoke is likewise associated with the smoking of hams and sausages in Germany and Scandinavia, and was valued for its aroma. What the recipe never mentions is proportion, and a reader without prior experience of curing has no way to supply it.