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Boiled Lambs' Tongues
Put half a dozen or so of lambs' tongues into a saucepan with enough cold water to cover them, and add the juice of half a lemon. Set the saucepan on the fire and boil the tongues until tender, place them on a dish when drained, and serve either hot or cold; if the latter, tartar sauce should accompany them.
A bare-bones Waldorf preparation that assumes the cook already knows the one step it omits: the tongues must be skinned. Everything else is a matter of patience and a well-salted pot.
- Peel them hotLambs' tongues are covered in a tough outer membrane that Oscar never mentions because any professional kitchen took it for granted. Lift each tongue out as soon as it is tender and slit the skin from tip to root while it is still too hot to handle comfortably; it slides off in one piece. Once cooled, it welds itself back on and has to be pared away with a knife.
- Timing"Until tender" is 1 to 1.5 hours at a bare simmer for lamb tongues, which are small — under 4 oz each. They are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thick root end. A hard rolling boil toughens the meat and clouds the liquid; keep it just trembling.
- Soak and saltSoak the tongues in cold water for a few hours first, changing it once, to draw out blood. The recipe gives no salt at all; add a good tablespoon to the pot along with a bay leaf, a halved onion and a few peppercorns, or the finished tongues will taste of nothing.
- What the lemon is doingThe recipe gives no reason for the juice of half a lemon. Acid in the pot is generally used to keep boiled meat pale, and it will also soften the faint muttony note of lamb offal; the quantity is too small to flavour the dish much. Vinegar would do the same job.
- SourcingLambs' tongues are not a supermarket item in most of the English-speaking world now. Order them from a halal or Middle Eastern butcher, a Mexican carniceria, or any butcher who breaks whole animals; they are cheap and usually sold frozen in packs.
- Serving coldFor the cold service, press the peeled tongues under a weighted plate in the refrigerator overnight, then slice them thin on a slight diagonal. Pressing firms the texture and makes clean slices possible. Tartar sauce of this period is broadly mayonnaise with capers, gherkins, shallot and parsley.
- YieldHalf a dozen tongues serve three or four as a lunch dish, or six to eight sliced cold as part of a cold table.
Tongue of every size was standard hotel and household fare in 1896, when Oscar Tschirky's book appeared; a large kitchen bought whole carcasses and had to sell every part of them, and offal dishes reflect that arithmetic rather than any pursuit of novelty. Lambs' tongues in particular were a cheap, tidy portion — small enough to serve whole, delicate enough to go on a cold buffet beside the galantines and the ham. The pairing with tartar sauce points to the Waldorf's French kitchen vocabulary, where a cold boiled meat was often served with a sharp mayonnaise-based sauce to cut the richness. Pickled and potted lambs' tongues remained a common British and American shop item well into the twentieth century, and the recipe's extreme brevity is itself a period signal: Oscar was writing for cooks who needed the outline, not the instruction.