Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Pickled Tongue
Pickled Tongue
Wash the tongue well, place it on a dish or pan, with plenty of salt water over it, and turn it over every day for four or five days, so that every part of it may be evenly salted. After the fourth or fifth day, mix together two ounces of salt, one-half ounce of saltpeter, and one ounce of brown sugar, and rub the mixture well into the tongue. Turn it over every day for a fortnight, and it is then ready for use.
This is a nitrate cure written for a professional larder with a cold room and a butcher's judgment, and it omits every variable that makes curing safe. It cannot be followed as printed.
- No weight, no ratioThe recipe never says how large the tongue is. Cure salts are dosed as a percentage of meat weight, so two ounces of salt and half an ounce of saltpetre may be a mild cure on a five-pound beef tongue and a wildly excessive one on a small veal tongue. Without a weight the dose is unknowable.
- Saltpetre is out of rangeSaltpetre dose unverifiable -- Half an ounce of saltpetre (usually potassium nitrate) rubbed onto a single tongue works out well above modern permitted nitrate levels for cured meat at any plausible tongue weight, though only part of a surface rub is actually taken up by the meat. Nitrate also has to be converted to nitrite by bacteria before it does anything, which is one reason old cures ran for weeks and gave variable results.
- "Plenty of salt water" is not a brineA working brine is specified by salinity, usually measured by weight of salt to weight of water or read with a brine tester. An unmeasured saltwater soak may be too weak to inhibit spoilage organisms at all during the first four or five days.
- No temperature anywhereThree weeks of curing must be held at refrigeration temperature, roughly 36-40F; a pan of meat turned daily on a warm kitchen counter is an incubator. The recipe gives no temperature at all.
- The botulism problemMoist, salted meat held for weeks at an uncontrolled temperature with an unverifiable nitrite level is the sort of condition in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin, and the toxin is not detectable by smell or appearance. The toxin is destroyed by thorough boiling, but the spores are not, and cured meat eaten cold or lightly cooked carries the risk.
- "Ready for use" means ready to cookA fortnight of dry cure does not make the tongue edible. Cured tongue was then simmered for hours, skinned and pressed. The original assumes a cook who already knows that; a reader who does not may take the phrase literally.
- If you want pickled tongueUse a current recipe from a source that specifies meat weight, a measured curing salt containing sodium nitrite, brine strength and a refrigerated holding temperature.
Pickled or corned tongue was standard nineteenth-century larder work rather than a delicacy: tongue is a hard-working muscle that is tough fresh, and weeks in salt preserved it, with long simmering doing the work of turning it into something that sliced cleanly for a cold buffet. Saltpetre was in the mix for colour as much as safety, since without nitrate cured beef turns a dull grey-brown instead of the pink diners expected. Oscar Tschirky was not a cook by trade but the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, and his 1896 book gathers the hotel kitchen's working notes; entries like this one read as reminders for staff who already knew the size of the tongues coming in from the butcher, which is exactly the knowledge the printed page leaves out.