Home › Cookery › To Pickle Tongue
To Pickle Tongue
Rub it well with salt and leave it alone four or five hours; pour off the foul brine; take two ounces saltpetre beaten fine, and rub it all over the tongue; then mix one-quarter of a pound brown sugar and one ounce sal-prunella (the bay salt and sal prunella beat very fine), and rub it well over the tongue. Let it lie in the pickle three or four days; make a brine of one gallon water with common salt strong enough to bear an egg, a half-pound brown sugar, two ounces saltpetre, and one-quarter of a pound bay salt. Boil one quarter of an hour, skimming well; when cold put in the tongue; let it lie in the pickle fourteen days, turning it every day. When ready to use take it out of the pickle, or hang it in wood smoke to dry.--Mrs A. M. D.
This is a nitrate cure written before anyone measured curing salts in parts per million, and the quantities and conditions here fall well outside what is now considered safe. The notes below explain the terms and the specific failures.
- Saltpetre, twice overTwo ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is rubbed directly onto a single tongue, and two more ounces go into the gallon of brine. Modern curing practice limits nitrate and nitrite to a few hundred parts per million of finished meat; this is orders of magnitude above that, and dry-rubbing a concentrated nitrate directly on the surface gives no control at all over how much ends up in the meat.
- Sal prunella is more of the sameSal prunella is potassium nitrate that has been melted and cast into cakes or balls, sometimes with a little sulphur — it was bought at the apothecary, though it turns up regularly in curing recipes of the period. Adding an ounce of it on top of the saltpetre compounds the nitrate load rather than doing anything different.
- Bay saltBay salt is coarse sea salt made by solar evaporation in shallow bays, valued for its slow dissolution in a cure. Coarse sea salt is the nearest thing today, but nothing about substituting it makes this recipe workable.
- "Strong enough to bear an egg"The old test for a strong brine: a raw egg floats at roughly 10 percent salt or above, well short of saturation. It tells you nothing precise, and a cure of this length depends entirely on knowing the actual salt concentration.
- No temperature anywhereThe tongue sits in brine for fourteen days plus three or four days in the dry rub, with no indication of temperature. In a Virginia larder that could mean anything. Extended curing above refrigeration temperature is exactly the condition that favours Clostridium botulinum in a low-oxygen, salted environment.
- The smoke is not cooking"Hang it in wood smoke to dry" is cold smoking — a drying and flavouring step, not a heat treatment. Nothing in this recipe ever brings the meat to a safe internal temperature, and it gives no cooking instruction at all before the tongue is taken out of the pickle to be used.
- If you want pickled tongueUse a current recipe with weighed curing salt, a stated brine strength, refrigerated cure and a specified cooking temperature. Beef tongue is still sold by many full-service butchers.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers — hence the initialled attributions like "Mrs A. M. D." — belongs to a moment when a household still expected to preserve its own meat. Pickled and smoked tongue was standard cold-larder fare in Britain and the American South alike: a cured tongue kept for weeks, sliced thin for breakfast, supper or a picnic hamper, and was a staple of the cold sideboard well into the twentieth century. Saltpetre had been used in meat curing for centuries because it fixes the red colour and suppresses spoilage, though the chemistry behind it — nitrate reduced by bacteria to nitrite, which does the actual work — was not understood until the 1890s. Recipes of this era therefore measure it by the ounce and by habit, which is precisely why they read alarmingly now.