Boiled Tongue
A boiled corned tongue is cooked the same as Boiled Corned Beef. If very salt, it should be soaked in cold water several hours, or over night, before cooking. Take from water when slightly cooled and remove skin.
The instruction here is deliberately thin because Farmer expects you to have read Boiled Corned Beef a page earlier. What follows is what that cross-reference assumes you already know.
- The hinge: peel it warmThe skin comes away cleanly only while the tongue is still hot enough to handle awkwardly. Let it go cold and the membrane bonds to the meat and has to be cut off in strips, taking good meat with it. Lift it from the liquid, run cold water over it for a minute, slit the skin along the underside and strip it off from the thick end toward the tip.
- Corned tongue today"Corned" means brine-cured, and a cured beef tongue is now a butcher or Latin/Jewish market item rather than a supermarket one. Fresh tongue is easier to find and will need salt in the cooking water; cured tongue is grey-pink raw and turns dull rose when cooked, not the bright pink of nitrited deli meat unless the cure included nitrite.
- SoakingFarmer's "several hours, or over night" is a real step with old-style heavy cures. With a modern commercial brine, an hour or two in cold water, or a single change of water, is usually enough. Taste a sliver of the cooking liquid after twenty minutes of simmering; if it is aggressively salty, dump it and start again with fresh water.
- Simmer, do not boilDespite the title, a rolling boil toughens and shreds the outer muscle. Bring it up, skim, then hold at a bare tremble around 180-190F for the whole time.
- TimingA 3 to 4 lb beef tongue takes about 3 to 3 1/2 hours; smaller veal tongues, an hour and a half. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance and the skin at the tip has begun to loosen on its own. Undercooked tongue is rubbery, and there is no fixing it except more time.
- Trim the rootThe thick end holds fat, small bones and glandular tissue. Cut that away after skinning; it is normally about an inch or two off the base.
- Cooling and slicing"Take from water when slightly cooled" refers only to peeling. For neat slices, return the peeled tongue to its strained liquid, cool, and refrigerate overnight; then slice thin across the grain. Served hot, slice on a slant and moisten with a little of the cooking broth.
- YieldA 3 1/2 lb tongue loses skin and trim and gives roughly 2 lb of edible meat, enough for six to eight as a main course, more as sandwiches.
Tongue was a standard economy of a period when a household bought large cuts and used the whole animal, and it appears among the beef preparations for exactly that reason: it is cheap, it keeps well cured, and cold sliced tongue was long a staple of the American supper table, the buffet and the lunchbox. Boiling was the standard treatment because a curing brine has to be leached out and because the muscle is dense with connective tissue that only long, wet, gentle heat will soften. The dish survives most visibly today in Jewish delicatessen and in Mexican lengua, both of which use the same method Farmer describes in two sentences.