Tongues, to Cure
INGREDIENTS. For a tongue of 7 lbs., 1 oz. of saltpetre, 1/2 oz. of black pepper, 4 oz. of sugar, 3 oz. of juniper berries, 6 oz. of salt. AVERAGE COST, of medium-sized tongue, 2s. 6d.
Rub the above ingredients well into the tongue, and let it remain in the pickle for 10 days or a fortnight: then drain it, tie it up in brown paper, and have it smoked for about 20 days over a wood fire; or it may be boiled out of this pickle.
TIME. From 10 to 14 days to remain in the pickle; to be smoked 24 days.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. If not wanted immediately, the tongue will keep 3 or 4 weeks without being too salt; then it must not be rubbed, but only turned in the pickle.
This is a dry cure for a whole beef tongue followed by three weeks of cold smoking, and it sits well outside what can be done safely in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain where the specific failures are rather than how to adapt them.
- The saltpetre doseOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to a 7 lb tongue works out at roughly 28 g of saltpetre in about 3.2 kg of meat — on the order of 8,000 parts per million of potassium nitrate. Modern curing regulations in both the UK and the US limit ingoing nitrate to a small fraction of that, and commercial cures deliver nitrite or nitrate in a pre-diluted salt so it cannot be mismeasured. Pure saltpetre weighed out by eye at this rate is not a seasoning quantity.
- Salt too low for the methodSix ounces of salt to 7 lbs of meat is about 5 per cent by weight, and it is rubbed on rather than dissolved into a measured brine. That is not enough salt, reliably distributed, to control Clostridium botulinum through weeks of curing and smoking at cellar temperature. The nitrate was doing much of the preserving work, at a dose no longer considered acceptable.
- Twenty days of cold smokeSmoking over a wood fire for the better part of three weeks means the meat sits for that whole period somewhere between ambient and warm — never hot enough to kill anything, and for far longer than the danger zone allows without a validated cure behind it. Cold smoking is the single step in traditional charcuterie that most needs measured salt, measured nitrite, controlled temperature and controlled humidity, and this recipe specifies none of them.
- The internal timings contradict each otherThe instructions say smoke for about 20 days; the TIME line says 24. The book does not reconcile the two.
- The 'boiled out of this pickle' optionBeeton offers boiling straight from the cure as an alternative to smoking, which was the safer of her two routes because the meat reaches a killing temperature. Even so, the saltpetre quantity is the same, and the ten to fourteen day unrefrigerated cure at whatever temperature the larder happened to be is a separate problem from the cooking.
- If you want cured tongueUse a current recipe from a source that gives cure percentages by weight of meat, specifies a nitrite curing salt rather than raw saltpetre, and states refrigeration temperatures. Salt beef and pickled tongue are still entirely makeable; this particular set of instructions is simply not the way to arrive at them.
- Reading the cost lineTwo shillings and sixpence for a medium tongue is the sort of figure Beeton included so a mistress could check her cook's accounts. It is a useful reminder that offal was cheap protein, and that a tongue was a household investment worth three weeks of processing.
Cured and pressed ox tongue was a fixture of the Victorian cold table, it sliced neatly, kept well, travelled to picnics and shooting lunches, and made a handsome centrepiece for a buffet or a supper table. Saltpetre had been the standard curing agent in English kitchens for centuries, valued as much for the bright pink colour it fixed in the meat as for its preserving effect; the chemistry behind that colour, and the nitrite it converts to, began to be worked out from the 1890s, and controlled dosing came later still. Juniper berries in the rub point to the northern European tradition of curing that runs through German and Scandinavian practice as well as British. The casual instruction to "have it smoked" is telling: it suggests that households did not always smoke meat themselves but might send it out to a butcher or a smokehouse, and Beeton could assume her readers knew where to take it.