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Grilled Sheep's Tongues
Boil the required number of sheep's tongues, skin them, and cut them into slices; spread over each a mixture of pepper, salt and curry powder, roll them up, fasten them with skewers, wrap them in paper, place them on a gridiron and grill them. Serve hot.
A terse professional note rather than a full recipe: it assumes a cook who already knows how long tongue takes and what a gridiron is. The gaps are all in the boiling and the wrapping.
- SourcingSheep's (lamb's) tongues are a butcher or halal-market item, rarely on supermarket shelves. They run about 3-4 oz each; allow two or three per person, so six to eight tongues serves three or four.
- The boiling is the whole jobTongue is dense muscle and needs long, gentle simmering — roughly 1.5 to 2 hours for lamb's tongues in salted water with an onion, bay and peppercorns, until a skewer slides in with no resistance. Undercooked tongue stays rubbery no matter how well it is grilled afterwards.
- Skin them hotThe rough outer membrane peels away cleanly only while the tongues are still steaming. Let them cool and it welds itself on; if that happens, return them to the hot liquid for a few minutes.
- Slicing and rollingTo get slices that will roll, cut lengthwise into thin planks rather than crosswise into rounds.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of the 1890s were generally milder and more turmeric-forward than a modern hot Madras. Use a gentle all-purpose curry powder, about a teaspoon to a pound of meat, with salt and plenty of black pepper.
- The paper wrappingA form of paper-wrapped cooking, close to en papillote. Use parchment brushed with butter or oil; ordinary printer paper and waxed paper are not suitable over direct heat. Watch it, as paper over live coals will scorch at the edges.
- GridironA grate of iron bars set over coals; some were hinged. A charcoal grill is the closest equivalent; a broiler at high heat with the pan four to five inches from the element also works. The meat is already cooked, so this stage is only about heat and colour — five to eight minutes, turning once.
- SkewersShort metal skewers or soaked wooden cocktail sticks. Remove them before serving, or warn whoever is eating.
- ServingOscar gives no accompaniment. A sharp mustard, a mango chutney or a squeeze of lemon cuts the richness; the dish is heavy on its own.
Oscar Tschirky was not a chef but the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and his 1896 Cook Book reads like a working reference compiled from the hotel's kitchens — nine hundred-odd pages of compressed instructions written for people who already knew the trade. Tongue was standard nineteenth-century hotel and household fare, cheap, keeping well, and appearing boiled, pressed, potted and grilled; sheep's tongues in particular were an economical alternative to the far larger ox tongue. The curry powder is a mark of the period, after decades of British Indian influence filtering into Anglo-American cooking.