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Stewed Beef Tongue
Cut the root off a tongue, but do not take all the fat off. Salt the tongue for a week with common salt and a little saltpeter, turning it every day. Then boil it till the skin can be easily removed. When skinned, stew it in a little good gravy until sufficiently tender, seasoning with mushroom catsup, soy, cayenne, pounded cloves and a little salt, if required. Serve with morels, mushrooms or truffles.
Beef Tongue, Terrapin Style Put a salted beer tongue into a saucepan of water, and boil it until quite tender; remove it, drain, and cut in halves lengthwise. Stick a few cloves in, put the pieces into another saucepan with sufficient water to cover, add an onion cut in slices, a little mace and browned flour, boil for a few minutes, and put in three finely chopped hard boiled eggs, remove the pan from the fire, pour in one wineglassful of wine, turn the whole out on a dish, and serve very hot with a garnish of hard boiled eggs cut in slices.
Two tongue recipes run together here. The first begins with a week-long home cure using unmeasured saltpetre, which is the part that cannot be reproduced as written; the second assumes you already have a cured tongue in hand.
- The curing step is the problem"A little saltpeter" is not a quantity. Nitrate and nitrite cures are dosed by weight against the weight of the meat, in narrow limits, because too little does nothing against Clostridium botulinum in a week-long anaerobic salt cure and too much is toxic. There is also no temperature given, and a large piece of muscle sitting a week at ambient kitchen temperature is a different food-safety proposition from one held near 38F.
- What to use insteadBuy a cured (corned) beef tongue, or follow a current curing recipe with weights and holding temperatures. The cooking and saucing instructions below the cure are sound; it is only the cure itself that should not be attempted from this text.
- Boiling the tongueA 3-4 lb tongue takes roughly 2.5 to 3.5 hours at a bare simmer. The skin peels off cleanly only while the tongue is still hot, so lift it, splash it with cold water to make it handleable, and skin it immediately; it fights you once cool.
- Mushroom catsup and soyMushroom catsup was a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not tomato ketchup; a mushroom-based condiment or a spoonful of the tongue's own reduced cooking liquid with soy stands in. "Soy" here means soy sauce, and it was a standard English store-cupboard seasoning by 1900.
- "A little good gravy"This means brown stock or a reduced meat sauce, not thickened pan gravy. About a cup for a whole tongue, enough to keep the bottom third submerged while it stews covered.
- Morels and trufflesDried morels, soaked and their liquor strained in, do the job. Truffle is decorative rather than structural here; ordinary cremini sauteed hard are a reasonable substitute.
- Browned flourFlour toasted dry in a pan until nut-brown. It thickens far less than raw flour for the same weight, so expect a thin sauce, which is what the second recipe intends.
- One wineglassfulCommonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz in period usage, though the measure was not standardised. The recipe has it go in after the pan leaves the fire; Madeira or sherry suits the mace-and-clove seasoning better than a table red.
- YieldA whole tongue serves 6 to 8 as a main course, sliced across the grain on the diagonal. Slice thin from the tip, thicker from the butt.
Salted tongue was a fixture of the nineteenth-century larder because the cut takes a cure well and slices handsomely cold, which made it a standing item on buffet and supper tables long before it appeared in a Waldorf cookbook. The second recipe's name is worth noting: "terrapin style" refers not to turtle in the dish but to the sauce, a thin brown gravy finished with hard-boiled egg, mace and wine — a flavour treatment generally attributed to Philadelphia rather than to the Maryland cooks who dressed diamondback terrapin with butter, cream and egg yolks. Terrapin was a luxury item on American hotel menus in the 1890s, and applying its sauce to cheap salted tongue is a fair sample of how a big kitchen stretched a fashionable style across the price range. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book gathers hundreds of such short entries, often lifted or adapted from earlier English household manuals, which explains the presence of mushroom catsup and "soy" in a New York hotel text.