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Beef Tongue Fillets, Sauteed
Cut cold boiled tongue into slices a third of an inch thick. Marinate for half an hour in Worcestershire sauce. Roll in cracker crumbs, then in beaten egg and again in crumbs, and saute in butter until well browned. Take them out on a hot platter and put into the pan a tablespoonful of butter, and when hot stir in a tablespoonful of flour; cook until smooth, and brown. Add 1/2 cupful of stock and 1/2 cupful of tomato pulp, or 3 tablespoonfuls of tomato catsup. Let all boil up, stirring briskly, and serve with the timbales. If a more highly seasoned sauce is liked, add a teaspoonful of minced parsley, half a teaspoonful of kitchen bouquet, a few drops of onion juice, and celery salt to taste.
A use for leftover boiled tongue: breaded slices browned in butter, with a quick brown sauce built in the same pan. Everything hinges on the tongue already being cooked, peeled and cold.
- Start with cooked tongueA whole beef tongue needs simmering 2.5 to 3.5 hours until a skewer slides in freely, then the tough outer skin is peeled while still warm. Chill it under weight overnight so it slices cleanly at the specified third of an inch.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs generally meant crushed soda crackers, a plainer and finer unseasoned crumb than panko. Saltines work, though they are saltier, so go easy on added salt elsewhere in the dish.
- Breading orderThe crumb-egg-crumb sequence is deliberate and worth following. The first dry coat gives the egg something to grip on a wet, marinated surface, and the second seals it.
- MarinadeHalf an hour in Worcestershire is a surface seasoning, not a tenderizer. Blot the slices before the first crumbing or the coating will slide.
- The pan sauceEqual tablespoons of butter and flour cooked to a brown roux, then a cup of liquid, is a thin gravy by modern taste. Cook the roux until it smells nutty and is the color of a walnut shell before adding the stock, and let it simmer a few minutes to lose any raw flour flavor.
- Tomato pulpThis means fresh tomatoes seeded and pressed through a sieve. Canned crushed tomato or passata substitutes directly; the catsup alternative brings noticeable sugar and vinegar, so taste before adding more seasoning.
- Kitchen bouquetA browning and seasoning liquid of caramel and vegetable extracts, still sold under that name. Half a teaspoon is for color and depth; leave it out and the sauce is simply paler.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. It gives onion flavor without pieces suspended in the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of tongue or number of servings. A single tongue would furnish several portions, but the sauce as written makes only about a cup, so scale it up if you are serving more than a few.
Beef tongue was a familiar item of household economy well into the twentieth century, comparatively inexpensive and treated as a respectable cold cut once boiled, peeled and pressed. Compilations like this one often grouped entries for using up the remains: sliced cold with mustard, worked into timbales, or, as here, crumbed and sauteed so that a leftover reappeared as a hot entree -- the reference to serving 'with the timbales' points to just such a run of recipes. The dressing-up is the point. A brown roux sauce sharpened with Worcestershire, tomato and celery salt was a common way of making plain boiled meat read as a course worth serving, and the bottled seasonings named here reflect how far commercial sauces had entered the American home kitchen.