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Virginia Beef Tongue
Stew a large fresh beef tongue in water enough to cover it until done and then remove the skin. Take one teacup of the liquor in which the tongue was cooked and add to it one teacup of brown sugar, one of stewed cranberries, one-half teacup of the best butter, one tablespoon of whole cloves and one-half lemon, sliced. Simmer the tongue in this mixture for one-fourth hour before serving. Place the tongue on a dish with the sauce, garnish with slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley and serve.
A whole simmered tongue finished in a sweet-sour cranberry sauce. The recipe assumes you know how long a tongue takes and what a teacup holds; neither is obvious now.
- The hinge: cook until the skin slipsA fresh beef tongue of 3 to 4 lb needs roughly 3 to 3½ hours at a bare simmer, and it is done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thick end. Peel it while it is still hot — the rough outer skin lifts away in sheets then, and welds itself back on as the meat cools.
- Fresh, not corned"Fresh" is doing real work here. A good deal of tongue is sold cured or pickled, which is far saltier and would fight the brown sugar. Ask a butcher for an uncured tongue, and trim the gristle, small bones and fat at the root end after peeling.
- TeacupPeriod American cookbooks generally reckon a teacup at about ¾ cup, though it was never standardised. Read the sauce as roughly ¾ cup each of cooking liquor, brown sugar and stewed cranberries, with 6 tablespoons of butter.
- A tablespoon of whole clovesThat is a genuinely aggressive amount — many dozens of cloves. Tie them in muslin so they can be pulled out, and consider halving them unless you want the sauce frankly medicinal.
- Stewed cranberriesThis means cranberries cooked down with a little water until they burst, not the jellied sauce in a can. If you use canned whole-berry sauce, cut the brown sugar back sharply or the result is a candy glaze.
- The final quarter hourFifteen minutes is enough to glaze the peeled tongue and let it take on the spice, but the sauce will be thin. Lift the tongue out and reduce the liquid by a third before spooning it over.
- SaltThe recipe adds none anywhere. Salt the cooking water like pasta water, and taste the finished sauce — sugar and cranberry both need salt to read as savoury.
- Yield and carvingA 3 to 4 lb tongue serves eight to ten. Slice thinly on a slight diagonal, starting at the tip; the slices from the thick end are the best of it. Good hot, and better cold the next day.
Tongue was standard household meat well into the twentieth century — cheap, keeping well, and stretching across a cold table for days — and general cookbooks of the era commonly carried several treatments of it. What marks this one as "Virginia" is the sauce: sugar, spice, citrus and fruit poured over plain boiled meat, a sweet-sour habit that runs through Southern and mid-Atlantic cookery and is generally traced to the sugared, clove-heavy sauces of English cookery. Cranberries are often said to have served as the American substitution for the barberries and currants of older recipes, cheap and abundant after the Cape Cod bogs were put into commercial production in the nineteenth century. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book as part of a broader line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper; regional attributions like this one gave a familiar dish a little borrowed prestige.