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Cold Calf's Tongue with Macedoine
Place six pickled tongues in a saucepan of boiling water and boil them until tender. Take them out, remove the skins, put them between two dishes and let them remain with a weight on the top until cold. Round them off at the root end, cut them flat at the sides and divide lengthwise in halves. Glaze with a pastebrush and mask with a thin layer of half-set aspic jelly to give a relief. In the meantime prepare a macedoine with carrots and potatoes formed in the shape of balls, Brussels sprouts, flowerets of cauliflowers, green or asparagus peas and French beans cut in diamond shapes. All of these vegetables must be blanched separately, well-seasoned and put in little piles of symmetrical size in the center of a dish. Arrange the halves of tongue round, with the points upwards, pour around a small quantity of aspic jelly and serve with tartar or ravigote sauce in a sauceboat.
A cold buffet centrepiece from the Waldorf's banquet repertoire, built for a long table rather than a dinner plate. The cooking is simple; the work is in the pressing, the coating and the arrangement.
- Skin them hotThe membrane peels away cleanly only while the tongue is still too hot to hold comfortably. Let one cool and the skin bonds to the meat and has to be pared off with a knife, taking good meat with it.
- Pickled means curedThese are brine-cured tongues, the same product sold as corned or pickled tongue at a good butcher. Calf's tongues run roughly 1 lb each and take about 2 hours at a bare simmer; beef tongues are larger, 2 to 4 lb, and need 3 hours or more. Test with a skewer at the thick end.
- SaltOld-style brines were far heavier than most commercial cures today. Taste the cooking water after 20 minutes; if it is aggressively salty, drain and start again with fresh water.
- PressingBetween two dishes with a weight means a few pounds — a couple of tins or a filled jug — left overnight in the refrigerator. This compacts the meat so it slices without crumbling and gives the flat sides the recipe asks you to cut.
- "Glaze" is meat glaze"Glaze" is most likely meat glaze -- not sugar. Brush with glace de viande, a heavily reduced brown stock that sets tacky and glossy on cold meat. Reduced demi-glace does the same job.
- Half-set aspicAspic is at the coating stage when it has thickened to raw egg white and just coats a spoon. Too warm and it runs off; too cold and it sets in lumps. Chill the tongues thoroughly first and work over a bowl so the runoff can be re-warmed and reused. Powdered gelatin in a clarified stock replaces house-made aspic acceptably.
- Blanch separately, then chillEach vegetable goes into its own pot of salted boiling water and straight into ice water. Cooked together, the cauliflower flavours the peas and the carrots stain the beans. Season each pile after it is cold — cold vegetables need more salt than they seem to.
- Asparagus peasUsually taken to mean the winged pod of Lotus tetragonolobus, rare now. Petits pois or the tips of thin asparagus stand in without comment.
- YieldSix calf's tongues will serve 12 to 16 as a buffet dish. For a household, one tongue with a quarter of the garnish scales down without trouble.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the food of a large hotel kitchen, and this dish shows the logic of that kitchen: everything is cooked in advance, held cold, and assembled at the last moment for the buffet. Macédoine is shaped mixed vegetables, the name generally traced to the mixed peoples of ancient Macedonia; the form was that Escoffier and his contemporaries codified, and the drill of blanching each vegetable apart and building it into symmetrical piles is pure garde-manger training. Tongue itself was ordinary food in 1896, commonly sold pickled and eaten cold with a sharp sauce; ravigote, a vinaigrette loud with capers, herbs and shallot, exists precisely to cut the richness of cold cured meat.