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Virginia Beef Tongue
1 beef tongue, fresh 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup stewed cranberries 1/4 cup butter or fat 1 tablespoon whole cloves 1/2 lemon Scrub the tongue and simmer it until tender, in water to cover. Remove the skin and trim the root end. Take one cup of the liquor in which the tongue was cooked and add the brown sugar, stewed cranberries, butter or other fat, cloves, and lemon, sliced. Simmer the tongue in this mixture for one-fourth hour. Place on a dish with the sauce, garnish with slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley, and serve. Tongue may be jellied and served cold.
A fresh (unsalted, uncured) beef tongue simmered until tender, then glazed in a sweet-tart cranberry sauce built from its own broth. The long simmer is the whole job; the glaze takes fifteen minutes.
- Skin it hotThe tough outer skin peels away cleanly only while the tongue is still very warm. Lift it from the broth, let it cool just enough to handle, then slit the skin lengthwise and pull it off. Once cold it clings and must be cut away with waste.
- Cooking timeNo time is given for the first simmer. A 3-4 lb fresh tongue needs roughly 3 to 3 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, until a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance. A pressure cooker does it in about 1 1/4 hours.
- Fresh, not cornedTongue is sold both fresh and cured; the cured kind comes out pink and salty. This recipe wants fresh tongue, which cooks to grey-brown. Ask a butcher, and if only cured is available, soak it and expect a saltier dish that will fight the sugar.
- Stewed cranberriesCranberries cooked with sugar and a little water until they burst -- essentially unstrained cranberry sauce. A cup of whole-berry sauce from a jar substitutes directly; jellied sauce will do but loses the texture.
- Whole clovesA tablespoon of whole cloves in a cup of sauce is assertive by modern taste. Tie them in cheesecloth or a tea ball so they can be pulled out, and taste after ten minutes.
- Reduce the glazeSimmering the peeled tongue a quarter hour in the sauce is for flavour and colour, not tenderness. If the sauce is thin at the end, lift the tongue out and boil the liquid down before spooning it over.
- Carving and yieldSlice thin on a slight diagonal, starting at the tip; the root end is coarser and better chopped for sandwiches or the jellied version. A 3-4 lb tongue serves six to eight.
- The jellied optionThe closing line assumes the cooking liquor will set on its own, which it usually does given how much collagen a tongue releases. Chill a spoonful of the strained broth to check; if it stays liquid, soften a tablespoon of gelatin per two cups before packing the diced meat in a mould.
Tongue was standard household meat through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth -- cheap, rich, and one of the few cuts that carved into neat uniform slices for a cold buffet or a sandwich tray. The sweet fruit glaze here belongs to a long Anglo-American habit of pairing boiled meats with something sharp and sugary, the same logic that puts currant jelly beside mutton and applesauce beside pork; cranberries were the New England contribution to that pattern. The "Virginia" label in period cookbooks is more familiar attached to hams than to tongues, and what it signals in this instance is not documented.