Home › Cookery › Tongue a La Terrapin
Tongue a La Terrapin
Take a freshly salted tongue and boil tender; take out, and split it, stick a few cloves in, cut up a small onion, put in some sticks of mace, and a little brown flour.
Have water enough in a stewpan to cover the tongue; mix in the ingredients, before putting in the tongue. Three hard boiled eggs chopped up fine and put in the stew. Add a glass of wine just before taking up. Send to the table hot garnished with hard boiled eggs cut in rings.--Mrs. L.C.
A mock terrapin: salted beef tongue stewed in a spiced brown gravy with chopped egg and wine, standing in for the diamondback terrapin of Chesapeake cooking. The method is sound, but nearly every quantity is left to the cook.
- Peel the tongue while it is hotThis is the hinge. The thick outer skin slips off easily the moment the tongue comes out of the pot and becomes nearly impossible to remove once it cools. Trim the gristle and small bones at the root at the same time.
- "Freshly salted" tongueA corned or pickled beef tongue, cured but not smoked and not long in the brine. Modern cured tongue can be very salty; if so, soak it in cold water for several hours, changing the water once, before boiling. A fresh tongue works too, with salt added to the cooking water.
- Boiling timeA 3 to 4 lb beef tongue needs 3 to 3 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance; undercooked tongue stays rubbery no matter how long it then stews.
- Brown flourFlour toasted dry in a heavy pan or a slow oven until it is the colour of cinnamon, then whisked into the liquid. It thickens less than raw flour but carries a nutty, roasted flavour. Two to three tablespoons is right for a quart of liquid.
- Sticks of maceBlade mace, the lacy aril of the nutmeg, sold whole in strips. Two or three blades is plenty. Ground mace is a substitute at about a quarter teaspoon, but it will cloud the gravy and cannot be fished out.
- A glass of wineA wineglassful in books of this period is reckoned at somewhere between two and four fluid ounces, so measurements vary; for a terrapin-style dish it would most likely be sherry or Madeira. Added at the end so the alcohol does not cook flat; it should taste of the wine.
- The eggsThree hard-boiled eggs chopped fine go into the stew as thickening as much as garnish. Some cooks of the same tradition mashed the yolks into the gravy and reserved the whites for the rings on top, which gives a smoother sauce.
- Yield and servingA 3 to 4 lb tongue serves six to eight. Slice it across the grain, on the diagonal, and spoon the gravy over; rice, toast points or plain boiled potatoes take the sauce well.
Terrapin — the diamondback turtle of the Chesapeake marshes — was the great luxury dish of Maryland and tidewater Virginia in the nineteenth century, stewed with butter, hard-boiled egg yolk and a heavy pour of sherry or Madeira. It was expensive and seasonal, and "à la terrapin" quickly came to mean not the turtle itself but that particular treatment: brown gravy, mace, chopped egg, wine at the last moment. Cooks applied it to calf's liver, to chicken, and here to a boiled salt tongue, producing a dish that tasted of the fashionable stew at a fraction of the cost. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialled recipes; the terse attribution to "Mrs. L.C." and the assumption that any reader knows how long to boil a tongue are characteristic of a book written by cooks for cooks who already knew the basics.