Home › To Stew an Ox-Tongue › To Stew an Ox-Tongue
To Stew an Ox-Tongue
380. Salt a tongue with saltpetre and common salt for a week, turning it every day. Boil it tender enough to peel; when done, stew it in a moderately strong gravy; season with soy, mushroom ketchup, cayenne, pounded cloves, and salt, if necessary. Serve with truffles, morels, or mushrooms. In this receipt the roots must be taken off the tongues before salting, but some fat left.
TO FRY OR BROIL RUMP OR BEEF STEAKS.
STEWED OX-CHEEK (PLAIN). 681. Soak and cleanse a fine cheek the day before it is to be eaten; put it into a stewpot that will cover close, with three quarts of water; simmer it after it has first boiled up and been well skimmed. In two hours put plenty of carrots and leeks, two or three turnips, a bunch of sweet herbs, some whole pepper, and four ounces of allspice. Skim it often; when the meat is tender, take it out; let the soup get cold, take off the cake of fat, and serve the soup separate or with the meat. The colour should be a fine brown, which may be effected by adding burnt sugar, or by frying some onions quite brown with flour, and simmering them with it. This last way improves the flavour of all soups and gravies of the brown kind. If vegetables are not approved in the soup, they may be taken out, and a small roll be toasted, or bread fried and added. Celery is a great addition, and should always be served. Where it is not to be got, the seed gives quite as good a flavour boiled in, and strained off.
TO FRY OR BROIL RUMP OR BEEF STEAKS. 352. Let the steaks be cut from the rump in rather thin layers, and the chops be as usual. Then fry in lard or dripping in the English manner (see pars. 97 and 103), turning them repeatedly until done. When ready, keep them hot in a dish by the fire, while making the gravy, which is done as follows:-Pour off as much of the fat as possible, but leaving behind all the gravy or coloured part (there must be, at least, altogether two table-spoonsful of gravy, or gravy and fat). Thicken this with a table-spoonful of flour, stirred into it dry; put the pan on the fire, and brown it slightly, then add a table-spoonful of ketchup (mushroom or walnut), a table-spoonful of Worcestershire sauce, or a little of mixed pickle chopped up; pepper and salt slightly, and reduce to a proper degree of thickness by adding hot water by degrees. Large onions sliced are sometimes fried with beef-steaks, or pickled mushrooms, and served with them, in which case they are taken out with the steaks, and the sauce made afterwards in the same way as above. If onions or mushrooms are not liked, it is usual to garnish with scraped horseradish, or pickles. (For directions to fry, see page 54.) 383. BROILED STEAKS should be cut from a well-kept rump, and they are generally liked about three-quarters of an inch thick. Most cooks beat them well with a rolling-pin for ten minutes; but if the meat is of good quality, and the rump has been well kept, there will be no necessity for this. Just before finishing, rub a lump of butter over, and lightly dredge with pepper and salt, adding the mushroom powder at discretion. Pickles and scraped horseradish make a good garnish, and for sauce, (see Meat Sauces.) (For directions to broil, see page 54.)
The tongue receipt assumes a cured-meat practice that no longer meets any safe standard, so it should be read rather than cooked. The surrounding receipts for ox-cheek and rump steak are straightforward once a few Victorian conventions are translated.
- Why the tongue failsIt calls for saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and salt with no weights, no ratio to the weight of the meat, and no stated temperature for the week of curing. Nitrate is potent in the low grams per kilogram and toxic well below the amounts a cook might guess at; a whole tongue held a week at an unspecified temperature in an unspecified brine strength is also squarely in the range where Clostridium botulinum is the reason nitrite is used in the first place. Use a current curing recipe with measured cure and a controlled fridge temperature, or buy the tongue ready-cured.
- PeelingThe rough outer skin lifts off only while the tongue is hot from its long simmer. Let it cool just enough to handle and peel immediately; once cold it grips.
- Soy and ketchup"Soy" here is soy sauce, then sold in Britain as a bottled table sauce. "Mushroom ketchup" is the thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, not a tomato product; it is still sold, and anchovy-free Worcestershire or a good mushroom extract stands in.
- MorelsMorels must be cooked through; they are not eaten raw or barely warmed. Dried ones need soaking and the grit-laden soaking water should be strained before use.
- Ox-cheek quantitiesFour ounces of allspice to three quarts of water in the cheek receipt is far outside modern practice and will overwhelm the pot. A teaspoon or two of whole berries gives the intended background warmth.
- Ox-cheek methodSimmer, never boil; the receipt gives no total time, only vegetables in at two hours and the meat out 'when tender', which for a cheek will be a good while longer. Vegetables added at the two-hour mark will end up soft rather than distinct. Chilling the broth overnight to lift the fat cake is still the cleanest way to degrease it.
- Burnt sugarThis is caramel colouring: sugar cooked to dark bitterness and let down with water. The alternative given, onions fried brown with flour, does more for flavour and is the better route.
- Steak thicknessThree-quarters of an inch is about 2 cm, a good grilling thickness. The ten minutes of beating with a rolling pin is unnecessary on any beef sold today; the author says as much.
- Pan gravyAt least two tablespoonsful of gravy, or gravy and fat, plus one of flour makes a small quantity of sharp sauce. Cook the flour a minute before adding liquid, and add the hot water in stages or it will go lumpy.
Ox tongue was one of the great standbys of the Victorian cold table: cured, boiled, pressed into a round tin and served in thin slices at breakfast, at suppers and at picnics, where its keeping quality mattered as much as its flavour. Saltpetre was the ordinary domestic means of getting that fixed red colour and some protection against spoilage, and it is often handed out in cookery books of the period without the weights that later food chemistry showed to be necessary. The cheek and the rump receipts sitting alongside show the same household logic at work from opposite ends of the animal — the cheek, cheap and gelatinous, stretched into both a soup and a meat dish from one pot, while the rump steak, the expensive cut, is dispatched in a few brisk lines with a pan gravy built on bottled sauces. Soy, mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire appear here as standard savoury bottled flavourings in a British kitchen of the period, the mushroom and walnut ketchups being the commercial successors of older home-made liquors.