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Scalloped Beef Tongue
Chop up sufficient cold cooked beef tongue to fill two breakfast cups, and mix in one teaspoonful each of capers, chopped parsley and salt, a little pepper, and one tablespoonful of onion juice, mixed with a teacupful of stock. Sprinkle sifted breadcrumbs over a well-buttered scallop dish, put in the tongue preparation, cover with more breadcrumbs, making the total quantity used one breakfast cupful, and put some small pieces of butter here and there over the top. Place the dish in the oven, bake for twenty minutes, remove and serve at once.
A leftovers dish from the era when a whole pickled or boiled tongue was a standing item in the larder. Nothing here is difficult, but the cup measures need translating and the mixture needs to be wetter than you might expect.
- Breakfast cup and teacupThese were never standardised, but a breakfast cup is usually reckoned at roughly 8-10 fl oz and a teacup at about 6 fl oz. Two breakfast cups of chopped tongue works out around 1 lb of meat; the teacupful of stock is about 3/4 cup.
- Oven temperatureOscar gives none. Everything is already cooked, so this is a browning and heating job: 375F for the stated twenty minutes will set the top without drying the interior.
- Onion juiceA period standby, made by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve. A tablespoon takes about half a medium onion; grated onion or a teaspoon of very finely minced shallot substitutes cleanly.
- Getting the tongueWhole beef tongue is a butcher order rather than a supermarket item. Sliced cooked or pickled tongue from a deli counter works, as does any well-seasoned cold braised beef if tongue is unavailable.
- Keep it moistThe hinge of the dish. Chopped cold meat plus dry crumbs will bake into a brick, so the mixture should be loose and visibly wet before it goes in. Add stock beyond the teacupful if it looks stiff.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt assumes fresh boiled tongue. Pickled or brine-cured tongue is already salty enough that you should taste the mixture first and likely add none.
- Crumbs"Sifted breadcrumbs" means fine dry crumbs, not fresh. One breakfast cup total, split between the buttered base and the top.
- YieldServes four as a lunch dish with a green salad, or six as a small course.
Scalloped dishes - chopped cooked meat or fish bound with stock, layered with crumbs and butter, and browned - were the standard American answer to the question of what to do with yesterday's joint, and they appear in household cookbooks throughout the late nineteenth century. Beef tongue was often a workaday item as much as a delicacy: cheap, sold whole, boiled or pickled in quantity, and eaten cold in slices until the last of it wanted disguising, though smoked and pickled tongue also appeared on grander cold tables. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's long-serving maître d'hôtel whose 1896 book ran to some nine hundred pages, included a good deal of this plain domestic cooking alongside the hotel's grander service, which is a reminder that even a luxury kitchen ran on the same economy of leftovers. The capers and onion juice are the giveaway of the period's taste - sharp, salty accents used to lift meat that had already given its best flavour to the pot.