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To Stew a Tongue
369. Salt a tongue with saltpetre and common salt for six or seven days, rubbing and turning it every day. Boil it till tender enough to peel; then stew it in a pretty good gravy, seasoned with ketchup, cayenne, and a little mace, adding salt if needed. The tongue should be served with truffles, morels, and mushrooms stewed in gravy, and little heaps of mashed turnips round the dish, or portions of brocoli.
The stewing and garnishing here are straightforward Victorian practice; the opening cure is not. Saltpetre is given with no weight, no ratio to the meat and no storage temperature, which is precisely the combination modern curing guidance exists to prevent.
- Why the cure failsSaltpetre is potassium nitrate, and its safe use depends on a measured dose by weight of meat. "Salt a tongue with saltpetre and common salt" gives no quantity at all, so the result may be either an ineffective cure or a nitrate overdose. Follow a current curing recipe with weighed cure salts if you want a pickled tongue.
- Six or seven days at what temperatureA dry cure of this length only works under refrigeration, roughly 36-40F. The original assumes a cold larder, which may well have been warmer than that; a large piece of offal held at room temperature for a week is a spoilage risk, not merely a flavour question.
- Ketchup does not mean tomatoIn a British kitchen of this period, unqualified "ketchup" is mushroom ketchup, sometimes walnut — a thin, dark, salty seasoning. Tomato ketchup would push the gravy sweet and sour in a way the recipe does not intend.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground. A single blade or a small pinch of ground mace is enough for a pan of gravy; it turns soapy quickly if overdone.
- Morels and trufflesDried morels, soaked and their soaking liquor strained into the gravy, are the practical option; truffles here, whether English-gathered or imported, were a marker of an expensive table rather than a flavour the dish needs.
- "Brocoli"The older spelling of broccoli. In the mid-nineteenth century this usually meant sprouting broccoli with slender stems rather than the tight modern calabrese head.
- Peeling the tongueThe one bit of technique worth keeping: the skin only strips cleanly while the tongue is hot from the pot. Left to cool, it sets fast and has to be cut away, taking meat with it.
- YieldA whole ox tongue runs 3-4 lb and serves eight to ten; a lamb tongue serves one or two, a veal tongue rather more. The recipe does not say which is meant, though the grand garnish and the mound of mashed turnip round the dish suggest the ox tongue as a centrepiece.