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Boiled Tongue
This should be cooked the day before serving. If very salt, soak in cold water for several hours. Add one onion sliced and a bouquet of soup herbs and bring to a boil. Skim thoroughly, cook fifteen minutes, season with salt and pepper, then place in the cooker and leave all day or overnight. Remove the skin while still warm, then return the tongue to the liquor in which it was cooked and leave until cold.
BEEF À LA MODE-Wipe and trim four or five pounds of beef cut from the round. Let stand in a prepared vinegar, made by boiling one cup of vinegar with a finely chopped onion, two teaspoons of salt, and one-half teaspoon each of cloves, pepper and dry mustard. After standing in this marinade for several hours, turning frequently, lard with strips of salt pork, and place in hot fat until brown. Remove the beef to the pail used in the fireless cooker and to the hot fat add enough boiling water almost to cover the meat. Boil for twenty minutes in the pail of the fireless cooker, add a small bag of mixed herbs, and pack in the fireless cooker for four or five hours. When ready to serve, season to taste and thicken the water in the pail with flour, for gravy. Boil this for three minutes on the fire, strain, pour over the meat and garnish the platter with vegetables cut in fancy shapes.
Both dishes here depend on a fireless cooker — an insulated wooden or metal chest packed with felt, hay or soapstone that held food hot with no source of heat. That device is the whole problem, and it is why these instructions cannot be followed today.
- The hold is unheated, and that is the hingeA tongue brought to a boil, skimmed and cooked only fifteen minutes goes into the box barely cooked through, then sits "all day or overnight" with nothing maintaining the temperature. An insulated box loses heat steadily; a dense tongue sitting in its cooking liquor will fall through the range where Clostridium perfringens and other spore-formers multiply, and it will spend hours there. Spores survive the initial boil, which is exactly the point of concern.
- Fifteen minutes is not a cook timeBeef tongue is a heavily worked muscle full of collagen; it wants two to three hours of maintained simmer. The original is not claiming otherwise — it is relying on stored heat to finish the job — but stored heat in an unmeasured box is not a temperature you can verify.
- Salt tongue is not cured for room-temperature holdingThe instruction to soak "if very salt" tells you the tongue is a brine-cured one, but the soaking deliberately removes much of that salt before the long unheated hold. Whatever preservative effect the cure had is reduced at precisely the moment it would be needed.
- Cooling in the liquor compounds itAfter skinning, the tongue is returned to the warm cooking liquor and left "until cold." A large mass of meat in a pot of hot liquid cools very slowly at room temperature, extending the same problem by several more hours.
- The beef à la mode has the same defectFour to five pounds of larded round is boiled twenty minutes, then packed for four or five hours with no heat source. Larding with salt pork carries surface bacteria into the interior of the joint, where a brief boil will not reach them and a slowly cooling box will not hold them in check.
- A modern slow cooker is not the same thingAn electric slow cooker holds a controlled temperature indefinitely; a fireless cooker only slows the loss of heat it was given. Substituting one for the other is not a translation of this recipe, and the timings here were written for the box. Use a current recipe for boiled tongue or beef à la mode instead.
The fireless cooker — also called a haybox or Norwegian cooking box — was a genuine enthusiasm from around the turn of the century through the 1920s, promoted in household manuals as a fuel-saving marvel for households burning coal or wood, and later as patriotic thrift during the First World War. The appeal was obvious: bring a pot to a boil in the morning, pack it in an insulated chest, and come home to dinner without tending a range all day. Boiled tongue was a natural candidate, being a cheap cured cut that traditionally demanded hours of slow simmering, and it appears throughout Victorian and Edwardian cookery pressed, sliced cold for supper, or glazed for a buffet. Beef à la mode — the French braised, larded, marinated joint, in English cookbooks by the eighteenth century and long since naturalised in America — was likewise chosen for its tolerance of long, gentle cooking. What the period could not measure is the actual temperature curve inside the box.