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Breaded Tongue with Tomato Sauce
Cut cold boiled corned tongue in slices one-third inch thick. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in egg and crumbs, and sauté in butter. Serve with Tomato Sauce I.
A chafing-dish supper dish that assumes a cooked corned tongue already sitting in the icebox. Everything hinges on the tongue being fully cold and firm before you slice it.
- Start with cold tongueA warm or freshly poached tongue tears and crumbles under the knife. Chill it thoroughly, ideally overnight under a light weight, so the third-inch slices hold together through egging and crumbing.
- Corned tongue todayPickled or corned beef tongue is a butcher-counter or deli item rather than a supermarket staple. A 2-3 lb corned tongue is simmered until a skewer slides in easily, commonly around three hours, then peeled while still warm; the outer skin comes away far more easily before the tongue cools.
- SaltCorned tongue is already well salted from the cure. The instruction to sprinkle with salt should be read as a light touch at most, and it can be skipped entirely. Pepper generously instead.
- CrumbsFarmer means dry sifted bread crumbs, finer and drier than panko. The recipe's order is egg then crumbs; Farmer's general breading direction elsewhere in the book is crumb, egg, crumb, which gives a sturdier coating if you prefer it.
- Sautéing in the chafing dishSauteing -- Get the butter properly hot and foaming before the slices go in, work in a single uncrowded layer, and expect two to three minutes a side. Clarified butter or a mix of butter and oil browns better without burning the milk solids.
- Tomato Sauce IThe cross-reference is to the book's basic roux-based tomato sauce: tomatoes cooked briefly with onion, strained, and bound with a butter-and-flour roux. Any smooth, slightly thickened tomato sauce fills the same role.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. A cooked tongue of two pounds or so, sliced this thin, will serve several as a lunch or supper dish with the sauce and something starchy alongside.
Tongue was ordinary butcher's meat in Farmer's day and cheap for the amount of meat it gives; its retreat to specialty counters is a matter of changing squeamishness rather than any change in the animal. Breading and frying cold cooked meat, then masking it with a sauce, is a standard nineteenth-century strategy for the second appearance of a joint, and the tomato sauce here does the work that a brown sauce or a mustard sauce would do elsewhere in the book. A corned tongue was exactly the sort of larder standby that supported such dishes, boiled on one day and eaten cold, sliced, or crumbed and fried for days afterward.