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Spiced Beef Tongue
Rub into the tongue a mixture of half a pint of sugar, a piece of saltpeter the size of a pea, and a table-spoon of ground cloves; immerse it in a brine made of three-fourths pound salt to two quarts water, taking care that it is kept covered; let lie two weeks, take out, wash well, and dry with a cloth; roll out a thin paste made of flour and water, wrap the tongue in it, and put it in pan to bake; bake slowly, basting well with lard and water; when done, remove paste and skin, and serve.
This is a two-week cure followed by a slow roast, and the cure is the problem: every quantity that governs safety is either absent or given by eye. The notes below explain what the instructions mean and where they break down.
- Saltpetre "the size of a pea"Potassium nitrate is the curing agent here, and it is dosed by guesswork against a tongue of unstated weight. Nitrate and nitrite levels in cured meat are now regulated in parts per million because the safe window is narrow; a pea-sized lump could be anywhere from negligible to well over the limit. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite salt as a percentage of meat weight, and this recipe gives no basis for that calculation.
- The brine is under-strength for a two-week cureThree-quarters of a pound of salt to two quarts of water is roughly a 15 percent brine, and the recipe never says where to keep it. In a nineteenth-century cellar or springhouse at 40F or below this worked; at room temperature a large muscle sitting for fourteen days in an uncooled brine is an anaerobic environment of exactly the kind that concerns food safety authorities. Neither temperature nor container hygiene is specified.
- No internal temperature anywhere"Bake slowly" and "when done" are the only doneness cues, and the flour-and-water crust makes it impossible to judge by eye. A cured tongue that has not reached a safe internal temperature has had nothing to compensate for a cure that cannot be verified. If you want spiced tongue, use a current recipe with weighed cure, a stated refrigeration temperature and a target internal temperature.
- Half a pint of sugarOne cup, dry measure. It is rubbed on as a dry cure before the tongue goes into the brine; the sugar to hand in this period may well have been a light brown or soft raw sugar rather than modern white granulated.
- "A thin paste made of flour and water"A huff paste, not something to eat. It is a sacrificial wrapper that keeps the meat from drying out in a slow oven, similar in principle to cooking in a sealed clay or salt crust. The recipe has it removed along with the skin before serving.
- "Bake slowly"The recipe gives no oven setting. In the wood-range vocabulary of the period this corresponds to a slow or slack oven, which modern writers usually render as somewhere around 300F. Basting with lard and water through a flour crust is an odd instruction and may suggest the paste was expected to crack and open as it dried.
- YieldA beef tongue generally runs 2 to 4 lb and will serve eight to twelve sliced thin; tongue commonly appeared as a cold sideboard and buffet meat rather than as a plated dinner course.
Beef tongue was one of the great economies of the nineteenth-century American kitchen: it came with the animal, it was too tough and too strong to serve fresh without long treatment, and it took brine beautifully. Cured and spiced, it kept for weeks, sliced cold into thin uniform rounds, and appeared on supper tables, at picnics and in sandwiches all through the century. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from Southern household contributions, sits at the tail end of the era when a family cured its own meat rather than buying it cured, and the vagueness of the saltpetre measurement here might be read as an assumption that the reader had done this before and knew the size of pea she meant. Commercial packers with weighed cures and cold storage took over the job within a generation, and pressed cold tongue still turns up at the delicatessen counter.