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Boiled Tongue
Wash and clean the tongue, cover with boiling water; add one fourth cup each of carrot, turnip, and onion, a bouquet of sweet herbs, four cloves, and two peppercorns. Simmer until tongue is tender. Cool in kettle, remove the skin, brush with melted butter, cover with buttered bread crumbs after placing in dripping pan.
Bake twenty minutes, basting often with chicken stock or Port wine. Cool, cut in thin slices, and garnish with slices of buttered toast, sprinkled with finely chopped pimolas.
A two-stage treatment: a long aromatic simmer, then a short crumbed bake for color. The recipe assumes you know a tongue needs hours, not minutes.
- Which tongueBeef tongue, 3-4 lb, is the default; veal or lamb tongues are smaller and cook faster. A fresh (unbrined) tongue is meant here, since no soaking or desalting is mentioned. If you buy a corned or pickled tongue, soak it and skip added salt.
- "Simmer until tender"For a 3-4 lb beef tongue that is 3 to 3 1/2 hours at a bare simmer. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance; undercooked tongue is rubbery and will not peel.
- Salt the waterThe ingredient list has none. Add about a tablespoon of salt per gallon of cooking water, or the meat will taste flat no matter what you baste it with.
- Peeling"Cool in kettle" means let it sit in its liquid until it can be handled, not until cold. The tough outer skin slips off easily while the tongue is still warm and becomes stubborn once chilled. Trim the gristle and small bones at the root end as well.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, browns the buttered crumbs in the twenty minutes specified; hotter and they scorch before the surface glazes.
- Dripping panA shallow roasting pan. Basting "often" with stock or Port means returning to it every few minutes; the Port will darken the crumbs.
- PimolasA period trade name for pimento-stuffed green olives. Chopped fine, they are the salty accent against the rich meat.
- Bouquet of sweet herbsParsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, or a tea ball. Sweet herbs meant the mild culinary herbs as against the bitter or medicinal ones.
- Yield and servingA 3-4 lb tongue serves eight to ten as an entree course. It is served cold and thinly sliced across the grain, so this is a make-ahead dish.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like a number of house-brand cookbooks of the period it covered the whole dinner rather than only the sweets that sold the product. Where tongue appears under "Entrees," the word carries its older sense: a made dish served between the heavier courses, or laid out cold on a buffet, rather than the main plate. Boiled tongue was thrifty, standard butcher's stock and, sliced cold, one of the few large joints that could be prepared a day ahead and served without carving at table, which may be why it turns up so often in American cookbooks and hotel menus from the 1870s through the First World War. The crumbing and glazing step looks like a borrowing from French practice, dressing an economical cut up to company standard, and the Port basting and stuffed-olive garnish mark the recipe as belonging to the more ambitious end of turn-of-the-century domestic cookery.