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To Boil Smoked Beef's Tongue
Wash the tongue well, and soak it in cold water over night. In the morning put it into a kettle full of cold water, stand it over a very slow fire, and simmer gently for four hours, or until you can pierce it with a fork, and it will be perfectly tender. If the water boils away, add more boiling water. When done, stand away to cool in the liquor in which it was boiled; when cold, remove the skin, beginning at the tip, stripping it back, and it is ready to use. If you wish to serve it as a hot meat dish for dinner, take it out when done; skin, place on a heated platter, cover the root end with sprigs of parsley, and garnish the dish with black currant jelly. Another very pretty way to serve cold boiled tongue, is to cut it in thin slices, arrange the slices around a large meat plate, each one overlapping the other, with sauce Tartare in the centre of the dish. Make six button radishes into tulips (as directed), stand them at equal distances around the dish. Nasturtium flowers may be placed between, with little bunches of watercress.
A cured tongue is one of the few large cuts that still rewards exactly this treatment: long, low, unhurried heat and then cooling in its own broth. The instructions hold up, with a few adjustments for what a butcher sells now.
- Never let it boilThe hinge of the whole dish is the words "very slow fire." Held at a bare shiver -- in modern terms somewhere near 180F, though the book gives no figure -- the tongue turns silky; a rolling boil tightens the muscle and leaves it stringy.
- What to buy"Smoked beef's tongue" means a whole beef tongue cured in brine and smoked. Most butchers today sell tongue fresh, with cured, pickled or corned tongue available as a specialty item, often vacuum-packed. Fresh tongue works with the same method but needs salting; a pickled tongue does not need the smoke to succeed.
- The overnight soakThis is desalting, not rehydrating. Cures of this period generally ran saltier than modern brines, so a supermarket pickled tongue will often need only a few hours in cold water, and a tongue labelled "ready to cook" needs little more than a rinse. Taste the soaking water to judge.
- Timing by weightFour hours suits a 3 to 4 lb tongue. Reckon roughly an hour per pound and trust the fork test at the thickest part rather than the clock; undercooked tongue is rubbery and no amount of resting will fix it.
- SkinningThe skin peels cleanly while the meat is still warm, so if you want it cold, cool it in the liquor only until you can handle it, peel from the tip back, then return it to the broth to finish cooling. Cold-set skin tears and takes good meat with it.
- Trim the rootThe thick root end holds glands and gristle the original assumes you will hide under parsley. Cutting it away after cooking is tidier and costs little meat.
- Sauce TartareA period sauce Tartare is generally a mayonnaise base with capers, pickles and herbs, built on raw yolks. Use pasteurised eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise as the base if it will sit out in the heat.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb tongue gives about 2 lb of trimmed meat, enough for eight as a cold plate. Slice it thin and across the grain; sliced thick it eats coarse.
Hot Weather Dishes is one of Sarah Tyson Rorer's short Philadelphia-school books of the late 1880s, aimed at the summer problem of feeding a household without heating the kitchen twice a day. A smoked tongue answers that neatly: one long simmer, ideally started early or done the day before, yields a cold cut that keeps for days and can be dressed up differently at each appearance. The garnishes here are pure period table-work — radishes cut into "tulips," nasturtium blossoms, watercress — reflecting a moment when cold service was judged as much on arrangement as on flavour. The black currant jelly served with the hot version can be read as an extension of the English habit, more usually associated with game and mutton, of pairing meat with a sharp fruit preserve.