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Fresh Beef Tongue with Sauce Piquante
Wash the tongue carefully, cover with boiling water and cook gently for one hour. Take some strips of larding pork, roll them in a mixture of chopped parsley, salt, pepper and a grating of nutmeg, then lard the tongue and lay it in a saucepan. Add soup stock or water to cover, and this seasoning: One carrot, sliced; two small onions, sliced; five branches of thyme; six cloves; six peppercorns; four bay leaves. Simmer for four hours, then lift the tongue to the serving dish, strain the juice in the saucepan, return the juice to the pan and thicken to a cream with flour made smooth in cold water. Add one-half cup of chopped pickles, then pour over the tongue and serve.
KIDNEY À LA FRANÇAISE-Soak a beef kidney in cold water for one hour, changing the water two or three times as it colors; then place on the fire in cold water and gently heat to the boiling point. Drain this water from the meat and put on fresh cold water for a second heating. Again heat and again change the water. In the third water gently simmer the kidney for ten minutes. Then remove it from the fire, and when cool enough to handle cut out most of the center fat and the cords. Slice thin, dip each piece in flour and fry in butter until brown. Remove the meat from the stewpan, add one tablespoon of flour to the oil and brown thoroughly. Return the meat to the pan, add boiling water to nearly cover, stirring until a smooth sauce is formed. Add one bay leaf, salt and pepper and a one-fourth-inch slice of lemon from which the peel has been removed. Stew gently for one hour with the pan covered, adding more water if it reduces too much. There should be only enough water to form a rich sauce. When ready to serve, remove the bay leaf and dish on a heated platter.
Two braises from the sauce chapter, both built on cuts most butchers now sell only by request. Neither is difficult, but both assume knowledge the text does not spell out.
- Peel the tongueThe recipe never says it, but the thick outer skin must come off after the first hour of boiling, while the tongue is still hot enough to handle with a cloth. It slips away in one sheet; let it cool and it grips. Trim the gristle and small bones at the root end at the same time.
- Larding porkThis is unsmoked fatback or salt pork cut into long strips and threaded through the meat with a larding needle. If you have neither needle nor fatback, bard instead: tie sheets of fat or thin-sliced pancetta over the surface and scatter the parsley, salt, pepper and nutmeg into the braising liquid.
- Fresh, not cornedA fresh tongue is unsalted, so the braise needs seasoning of its own. Salt the cooking liquid as you would a stock. A corned or pickled tongue, which some shops carry instead, would need no added salt at all and would not want the pickles at the end.
- Herbs and spiceFive branches of thyme means five sprigs. Four bay leaves in a five-hour braise is assertive by current taste; two is plenty for a 3 to 4 lb tongue.
- The heat levelSimmer means bare movement at the surface, around 180-190F. A rolling boil over five hours will shred the outer muscle and cloud the liquid you are about to thicken.
- ThickeningFlour slaked in cold water goes in off the boil, whisked, then simmered a few minutes to lose the raw taste. Add the chopped pickles at the very end so they stay crisp and sharp; that acid is the whole point of a sauce piquante.
- YieldA whole beef tongue runs 3 to 4 lb and serves six to eight. Carve it across the grain, starting at the tip, and give the thicker root-end slices to whoever likes them best.
- On the kidneyThe three changes of water are there to draw out the ammoniacal smell of beef kidney, and they work. Beef kidney is tough and genuinely wants the full hour of stewing; do not shorten it as you would for lamb kidney, which needs only minutes. The instruction to "add one tablespoon of flour to the oil" means the butter and fat left in the pan after frying.
Sauce piquante is one of the old French mother-sauce derivatives: a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallot and chopped gherkins, traditionally sent out with boiled or braised meats that would be flat on their own. Tongue is exactly that kind of meat, rich and mild, and the pickles here do the work the vinegar would in a classical version. The Butterick Publishing Company was better known for dress patterns, and one might read the pairing of thrifty offal with a sauce that carries a French name as pitched at households running on a budget with some pretension to style. Tongue and kidney were cheap, sold in every market, and appear throughout American and British cookery of the period; their near-disappearance from home kitchens is often put down to a change in taste rather than in supply, and the elaborate soaking regime for kidney in the second recipe suggests that even in 1911 cooks needed persuading.