Home › Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's › Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Ingredients
Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Ingredients
No. 96. Timballo alla Lombarda Ingredients: Macaroni, fowl or game, eggs, stock, Veluté sauce (No. 2), tongue, butter, truffles.
Butter a smooth mould, then boil some macaroni, but take care that it is in long pieces. When cold, take the longest bits and line the bottom of the mould, making the macaroni go in circles; and when you come to the end of one piece, join on the next as closely as possible until the whole mould is lined; paint it over now and then with white of egg beaten up; then mask the whole inside with a thin layer of forcemeat of fowl, which should also be put on with white of egg to make it adhere; then cut up the bits of macaroni which remain, warm them up in some good fowl stock and Veluté sauce much reduced, a little melted butter, some bits of truffle cut into dice, tongue, fowl, or game also cut up in pieces. When the mould is full, put on another layer of forcemeat, steam for an hour, then turn out and serve with sauce. a No. 98. Lingua di Manzo ai Citriuoli (Tongue with Cucumber) Ingredients: Ox tongue, salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley, bacon, veal, carrots, onions, thyme, bay leaves, cloves, stock.
Gently boil an ox tongue until you can peel off the skin, then lard it, season it with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and chopped parsley, and boil it with some bits of bacon, ham, veal, a carrot, an onion, two very good brown bay leaves, thyme and two No. 97. Lingua alla Visconti (Tongue) Ingredients: Tongue, glaze, bread, spinach, white grapes, port.
Soak a smoked tongue in fresh water for forty-eight hours, then boil it till it is tender. Peel off the skin, cut the tongue in rather thick slices, and glaze them. Prepare an oval border of fried bread, cover it with spinach about two inches thick, and on this arrange the slices of tongue. Fill in the centre of the dish with white grapes cooked in port or muscat. cloves. Pour some good stock over it and let it simmer gently until it is cooked. Put the tongue on a dish and garnish it with slices of fried cucumber. Boil the cucumber for two minutes before you fry it, to take away the bitter taste. Serve the tongue with a sauce piquante, made with one dessert-spoonful of New Century sauce to a quarter pint of good Espagnole sauce (No. 1).
No. 99. Lingue di Castrato alla Cuciniera (Sheep's Tongues) Ingredients: Sheep's tongues, bacon, beef, onions, herbs, spice, eggs, butter, flour.
Cook three or four sheep's tongues in good stock, and add some slices of bacon, bits of beef, two onions, a bunch of herbs, and a pinch of spice.
Let them get cold, flour them and mask them with egg beaten up and fry quickly in butter.
Four tongue dishes from a book arranged by ingredient, all of them assuming a cook who already has stock, forcemeat and two mother sauces on hand. The techniques hold up; the salt levels and shopping list have moved on.
- Buy the tongue cooked if you likeA whole ox tongue is 3-4 lb and needs 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer before the skin will strip. The skin must be peeled while the tongue is still hot — let it cool in the pot and it welds on. Trim the gristle and small bones from the root end before slicing.
- The 48-hour soak (No. 97)Written for a heavily salt-and-saltpetre-cured smoked tongue that would otherwise be inedible. Modern brined or smoked tongues are far milder; taste a sliver of the poaching water after an hour and stop soaking when it is merely seasoned. Overnight is usually plenty.
- "Glaze" means meat glazeNot sugar. Stock reduced to a syrupy, sticky glace de viande, brushed on the warm slices to give gloss. A few spoonfuls of reduced brown stock, or commercial demi-glace boiled down, does the same job.
- New Century sauceApparently a proprietary bottled table sauce of the period; it does not appear to be sold now. It seems to have functioned as a sharp, spiced condiment -- a dessert-spoonful of a Worcestershire or mushroom ketchup type sauce stirred into the quarter pint of Espagnole gives roughly the intended effect.
- The timballo hinge (No. 96)Everything depends on the macaroni being cooked, cooled and still in unbroken lengths, and on the beaten egg white gluing the spiral to the buttered mould. Cook the macaroni a minute short so it stays firm, drain it in a single layer, and chill it before you start coiling. A 1½–2 quart charlotte or pudding mould is the right size.
- Steaming, not bakingAn hour covered over simmering water, the mould foiled or papered so condensation does not run in. Let it stand five minutes before turning out or the lining tears.
- Larding (No. 98)Threading strips of pork back fat through the meat with a larding needle. Tongue is fatty enough in itself that the step can be skipped without much loss, and back fat means asking a butcher in advance.
- CucumberThe two-minute blanch was for the bitterness of older field cucumbers. Most cucumbers sold now are bred for low bitterness, so blanch mainly to soften before frying.
- Sheep's tongues (No. 99)Rarely in supermarkets; halal and Middle Eastern butchers stock them, often frozen. They are small, and after simmering and cooling they slice and coat more neatly if pressed briefly under a plate.
- YieldsThe timballo will probably serve six to eight; a whole ox tongue perhaps eight to ten hot, more if pressed and sliced cold.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) was Mrs W. G. Waters's attempt to teach English households Italian cooking inside a Boccaccio-style frame of ten diners telling stories over ten days, and these entries show how thoroughly that project ran through French professional technique — velouté, Espagnole, forcemeat, glaze — with Italian names attached. Tongue was ordinary food then in a way it is not now: a cheap, large, gelatinous cut that could be boiled, pressed, sliced cold for a buffet, or dressed up as here with spinach, port-stewed grapes and fried bread. The timballo — the word shares a root with timbale and ultimately with the drum-shaped mould — belongs to a much older aristocratic Italian tradition of enclosing a rich ragù inside pasta or pastry, of which the Sicilian timballo di maccheroni is the best-known survivor. The Visconti name on No. 97 is the sort of dynastic flourish period cookbooks attached freely to dishes; it is generally decorative rather than documented.