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Boiled Beef Tongue with Chestnuts
Place a pickled beef tongue in a bowl of water to soak, then put it in a saucepan with water to cover and boil for two hours; take it out, drain and remove the skin. Cover the bottom of a saucepan with vegetables cut in slices and a few sweet herbs, place the tongue on top and pour in enough broth and white wine to moisten to half its height. Cover with paper, place over a slow fire and cook until the tongue is tender, turning it occasionally so as to glaze it on both sides. Have ready a puree of chestnuts, moderately thick, spread it over a dish and place the tongue on it; add a little more broth to the liquor in the saucepan, boil well, skim and strain into another saucepan, reduce it to half-glaze, pour it over the tongue, and serve.
A two-stage treatment: the tongue is first simmered to tenderness, then braised in an aromatic bath until it takes on a glaze. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings assume a butcher's tongue and a coal range.
- Peel it hotThe skin slips off cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming; once it cools the membrane welds itself to the meat. Drain, let it sit a minute or two, then slit the underside and peel with a towel to protect your hands.
- Pickled tongue and the soakA pickled (brine-cured) tongue was standard in 1900 and is still sold at kosher butchers and some delis. The soak is for salt, not dirt — several hours in cold water, changed once or twice. If you have a fresh tongue instead, it needs no soaking but will be blander.
- Two hours is a starting pointA 3 lb beef tongue usually wants 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer before it will peel and give to a skewer. Go by feel, and remember it gets a further braise afterwards.
- "A slow fire"The lowest steady simmer you can hold. The recipe gives no time for this stage: cook until the tongue is tender. The point of it is flavour and glazing rather than further tenderising.
- "Cover with paper"This is a cartouche: a round of parchment laid directly on the surface, not a lid. It keeps the exposed top of the tongue moist while allowing the liquid to reduce, which is what produces the glaze. Turning the tongue occasionally, as the recipe directs, bastes both sides.
- Half-glazeDemi-glace here simply means the strained braising liquid boiled down until it coats a spoon and shines — roughly by half to two-thirds. Skim the fat as it rises or the sauce will break greasy over the chestnut purée.
- The chestnut puréeSimmer peeled chestnuts in broth or milk until soft, then pass and beat with butter. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts work perfectly and save an hour of peeling; "moderately thick" means it should hold a spoon-track without weeping.
- Yield and carvingA 3 lb tongue serves six to eight. Carve across the grain in thin slices, starting at the wide middle and working toward the tip, and discard the fat and gristle at the root end.
Tongue was a familiar presence in the nineteenth-century dining room rather than an oddity — it slices cleanly, holds its shape on a buffet, and takes a glaze well, and it turns up cold on Waldorf sideboards and hot, as here, on the menu proper. The method Oscar Tschirky sets down is broadly classical French: brais\</finished with the reduced braising liquor as its own sauce, close in outline to the langue de bœuf braisée of the Escoffier generation. Chestnuts as a partner belong to the same tradition and the same calendar — they came into the American market in autumn and were paired with braised and roasted meats through the winter, purée being the tidiest way to serve them under a sliced joint. The book dates from Oscar's years as maître d'hôtel of the original Waldorf on Fifth Avenue in the 1890s, when the hotel kitchen was working in a Parisian idiom for New Yorkers who wanted to eat as Europeans did.