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Glazed Lambs' Tongues
Put two or three glazed lambs' tongues of a good pink color into a saucepan of water and boil for two hours, take them out, skin, and cut them lengthwise into halves. Place them in a pan with a little meat glaze over, cover well, and brown in the oven. Put them on a dish and serve, with spinach and boiled artichokes for a garnish.
A short entry that assumes a great deal: chiefly that your butcher sells cured lamb tongues and that you have meat glaze on hand. Both are fixable, but neither is a supermarket item.
- "Glazed" means cured, not sugaredThe pink color the recipe insists on points to a brine cure containing saltpetre, the same sort of cure that turns beef tongue and corned beef pink; "glazed" here most likely stands for such ready-cured tongues, though the term is not a standard one and the recipe applies meat glaze separately. Fresh lamb tongues are grey-brown when cooked and will taste mild rather than hammy; they work, but the dish loses its point. Cured lamb or veal tongues can often be found at halal, kosher and Eastern European butchers.
- Quantity and yieldTwo or three lamb tongues, split, is a first course for two to three people, not a main. A lamb tongue weighs roughly 3-5 oz; if you are feeding four as a main, count on two tongues each or substitute one veal tongue.
- Boil means simmerTwo hours at a true rolling boil will shred the meat and toughen the outer muscle. Bring to a boil, then hold at a bare simmer, covered, for about two hours, until a skewer slides in with no resistance. Cured tongues benefit from a change of water if the brine was heavy.
- Skin them hotThis is the hinge of the recipe. The tough outer membrane peels away cleanly only while the tongue is still too hot to hold comfortably; let it cool and the skin bonds to the meat and has to be cut off, taking good flesh with it. Lift the tongue out, hold it with a towel, slit the skin at the tip and strip it back toward the root. Trim the gristly root end as well.
- Meat glazeOscar's glace de viande is brown veal stock reduced until it sets to a syrup. Reduce good unsalted beef or veal stock by three-quarters, or thin a spoonful of commercial demi-glace concentrate. Do not salt it: a cured tongue plus a reduction is already at the limit.
- Browning in the ovenHe means a hot oven, though no temperature is given; something around 425-450F for 10-15 minutes will do it, basting once or twice so the glaze lacquers the cut faces. "Cover well" probably refers to covering the tongues with glaze rather than putting a lid on the pan, since a lid would steam them and prevent browning.
- The garnishBoiled artichokes here means whole globe artichokes or trimmed bottoms, not the marinated jarred kind. Buttered spinach, squeezed dry, and warm artichoke bottoms both stand up to the salt of the tongue.
Tongue was a fixture of the well-run larder long before Oscar Tschirky put this in The Cook Book (1896): cheap, slow-cooking, and improved by curing, it appeared cold and pressed on the buffet, hot with piquant sauce at family dinners, and glazed on hotel menus. Lamb tongues, being small, would have suited an individual portion where the larger beef tongue was carved. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the Waldorf book, which presumes a kitchen where glace de viande is already to hand - the one thing a modern domestic cook has to build from scratch. Offal cookery of this kind faded from American middle-class tables over the twentieth century, and cured lamb tongue remains easier to buy from specialist and immigrant-neighborhood butchers than in a chain grocery.