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Ox Tongue
Cook the ox tongue in stock or in meat extract and water. Make the hunters' sauce, as for a hare, but sprinkle into it some chopped sultanas. Take the tongue out of the stock and skin it, cut it in neat pieces if you wish, and let it heat in your sauce.
Two recipes in one line: a long-simmered tongue and a sauce borrowed from the book's hare entry. The instructions assume you know both, so the timings and the sauce are worth spelling out.
- Skin it while it is hotThis is the hinge. The tough outer skin peels away cleanly the moment the tongue comes out of the liquid, and becomes nearly impossible to remove once it cools. Lift it out, slit the skin lengthways and pull it off in sheets while you can still barely handle it, then trim the gristle and small bones at the root end.
- Cooking timeThe recipe gives none. A fresh ox tongue of 3 to 4 lb needs 3 to 3 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, covered, until a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance. Boiling hard toughens it; keep the liquid barely trembling.
- Fresh, salted or pickledTongue was commonly sold both fresh and salted or pickled. A salted or brine-cured tongue should be soaked in cold water for several hours, or overnight, with the water changed before cooking, or the finished dish will be very salty. Tongue sold today is often fresh.
- Meat extractCommercial beef extracts of the period included Bovril, Liebig's and Oxo. A good beef stock, or bouillon cubes or concentrate made up to strength, does the same job. Add an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and a few peppercorns to the pot.
- Hunters' sauceThe recipe cross-refers to the book's hare entry. A hunters' sauce (sauce chasseur) is generally a brown sauce built on the pan or cooking liquid with onion or shallot, mushrooms, a little wine or vinegar and a thickening of butter and flour. For six, reckon on roughly a pint.
- SultanasGolden raisins. Chopping them, as directed, keeps them from sitting as whole lumps in the sauce; they will plump and sweeten the sauce as the tongue reheats in it, giving the sweet-sour balance typical of Flemish braises.
- SlicingCut across the grain, on a slight angle, in slices about a quarter-inch thick. The tip is leaner and the root end fattier; mix them across the plates.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb tongue serves six to eight. Served hot with the sauce, it wants boiled or mashed potatoes to take the surplus.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled by Mrs. Brian Luck in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief funds. That origin explains its manner: the recipes were taken down from cooks working from memory, with no need to explain to a fellow housewife how long a tongue takes or what goes into a hunters' sauce. Tongue was cheap, filling offal in both countries, and pairing it with a game sauce sharpened with vinegar and sweetened with dried fruit is often said to be characteristically Flemish -- the same sweet-sour instinct generally credited with producing carbonnade and the raisin sauces served with boiled beef and ham across the Low Countries. The cross-reference to hare is a reminder that chasseur is traditionally traced to a sauce for game and was borrowed, in thrifty kitchens, for whatever meat was actually in the house.