Home › Meats › Scalloped Tongue
Scalloped Tongue
1 pint chopped tongue 1 teaspoon onion juice 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon capers 1 cup bread crumbs 1/2 cup stock 3 tablespoons butter Butter the scallop dish, cover the bottom with bread crumbs. Mix meat with parsley, salt, capers and pepper. Distribute this over bread crumbs. Add some of the butter between layers, pour over the stock and onion juice and add remaining crumbs and butter for top layer. Bake twenty minutes.
A leftovers dish from the era when a whole beef tongue was a standard boiled meat and the remains had to be used up. The recipe assumes several things a modern cook has to supply, starting with the fact that the tongue is already cooked.
- The tongue must be cooked firstNothing here cooks raw meat through. Start with beef tongue that has been simmered until tender (2-3 hours for a small one, longer for a large), peeled while warm, and chilled before chopping. Deli-sliced cooked tongue, chopped, works as well.
- A pint of chopped meatMeasured by volume, not weight: roughly 1 lb, or 2 cups packed. Chop by hand to a coarse dice rather than grinding, or the layers turn to paste.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, for the stated twenty minutes should be enough; the dish only needs heating through and browning on top.
- Onion juiceGrate half an onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze grated onion in a cloth. A teaspoon is a small amount of a very sharp thing, which is the point; chopped onion would stay raw in twenty minutes.
- Stock is the limiting ingredientHalf a cup for a pound of meat and a cup of crumbs is sparing, and dry tongue is unpleasant. Use the strained liquid the tongue was boiled in, and add another few tablespoons if the mixture looks at all dry going into the dish.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, not the fine dry commercial kind, which will pack down and go sandy. The top layer wants a little more butter than seems necessary so it browns rather than scorches.
- PepperCalled for in the method but omitted from the ingredient list, as often happens in these books. A quarter teaspoon, freshly ground.
- YieldFour servings as a main dish in a 1 1/2-quart baking dish. Capers and a mustard or horseradish sauce alongside carry the flavour; the dish itself is mild.
Scalloped dishes -- meat or fish layered with buttered crumbs and moistened with stock or cream -- were a common American way of turning yesterday's boiled meat into today's supper, and many general cookbooks of the period carry several of them. Boiled beef tongue was familiar household food, and because it was usually cooked whole there was often some left. The capers and onion juice are doing the work that vinegar and pickles do in much cold-meat cookery of the time, cutting the richness of a fatty cut.