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Pickled Lambs' Tongues
Place six or eight lambs' tongues in a saucepan with enough salted water to cover, add the juice of half a lemon, and boil until they are tender, which should take about two hours. Remove them, place them in a jar, pour sufficient hot spiced vinegar to cover, and allow them to remain for several days, when they will be ready for use.
A cold-larder preparation that depends on two things the original leaves unstated: peeling the tongues at the right moment, and what exactly goes into the spiced vinegar.
- Peel them hotThe rough outer skin slips off easily the moment the tongues come out of the water and becomes stubborn as they cool. Lift one at a time, hold it in a towel, and pull the skin away before it sets; trim the gristle at the root end as well.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard boil for two hours toughens the muscle and shreds the surface. Hold the water at a bare simmer and start testing at 90 minutes with a skewer, which should slide in with no resistance. Lambs' tongues are small and often done well before the two hours quoted.
- Spiced vinegarThe book assumes the reader has spiced vinegar to hand and gives no formula. One workable version: bring cider or white wine vinegar to a boil with a couple of bay leaves, a sliced shallot, a tablespoon of mixed pickling spice, a few peppercorns and a teaspoon of salt per pint, then use it hot as directed. Malt vinegar is the usual English pickling vinegar and gives a darker, sharper result.
- Salted waterAbout a tablespoon of salt per quart is right for the cooking liquid; the recipe does not specify a quantity.
- Keep them coldThe original assumes a cool larder and days of use. Pack the tongues into a clean jar, cover completely with the hot vinegar, seal when cool and keep in the refrigerator, where they will hold about two weeks. Any tongue not submerged in the liquid should be pressed down or removed.
- SourcingLambs' tongues are a special order from most butchers and are sold frozen at halal and Middle Eastern markets, usually in packs of six to twelve. One veal tongue or a small beef tongue can be treated the same way, but will need three hours or more and should be sliced rather than served whole.
- Yield and servingSix to eight tongues serve six as a cold plate. Slice them lengthwise or on a slight bias, and serve with mustard, cornichons, or a leaf salad; they also go into sandwiches and were standard on a cold buffet.
Pickled tongue belongs to the long tradition of the cold larder, where cooked meats were held under vinegar or in aspic so that something respectable could be put on a plate without lighting the range. Lambs' tongues in particular were a cheap and abundant byproduct of the mutton trade, and they turn up in English and American cookery books through the nineteenth century in jars, in potted form, and glazed for the sideboard. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's long-serving maitre d'hotel, was writing at a moment when a great hotel kitchen still handled whole carcasses and expected every part to earn its keep; a hotel garde-manger would have kept these going in quantity for buffet service, club breakfasts and sandwich orders. The dish reads as thrift, but on a hotel cold table it read as variety, which is a fair summary of how offal worked in the period.