No. 1469

Tongue, Italian, Baked

Langue a l'Italienne au Gratin

Cold braised tongue may be used for this, or else unsmoked boiled red beef tongue. Cut into thin and pared slices, put inside a drill pocket furnished with a grooved socket, some potato croquette preparation (No. 2782), not too firm; force a border of this on the extreme edge of the inside of a dish, garnishing the interior of the border with sliced tongue. Fry in butter one shallot, some chives, and a few mushrooms all finely chopped, thicken with a thin bechamel sauce (No. 409), stirring in some grated parmesan cheese, cover the tongue with this, sprinkle grated bread raspings and parmesan cheese on top, pour over some butter, and put it in the oven to acquire a good color.

← No. 1468 Beef Tongue a la Soligny Beef No. 1470 Beef Tongue, Macedoine →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you already have cooked tongue on hand and a kitchen stocked with his numbered base preparations. Translated, this is sliced tongue in a duxelles-cream sauce, ringed with piped potato and browned as a gratin.

"Drill pocket furnished with a grooved socket"A pastry bag fitted with a large star tip. Pipe the potato as a border around the rim of a shallow gratin dish, then fill the centre with the tongue.
Potato croquette preparationRanhofer's croquette mixture (his No. 2782) is of the usual period type: mashed or riced potato bound with butter and egg yolk, close to a duchesse potato. "Not too firm" means it should pipe cleanly without tearing; slacken with a little cream if it fights the bag.
Unsmoked red beef tongue"Red" means brine-cured (salt with saltpetre in Ranhofer's day), which is what gives the pink colour — not fresh tongue. Modern equivalents are sold as pickled or corned tongue. Fresh tongue works too and will simply be grey-brown.
Cooking the tongue, if starting rawA 3–4 lb beef tongue needs roughly 3 to 3½ hours at a bare simmer. Peel off the rough outer skin while it is still hot; it comes away much less easily once cold. Chilling it before slicing makes thin, trimmed ("pared") slices easier to cut.
Béchamel and cheeseUse a thin béchamel — pourable, roughly the consistency of heavy cream — since the mushrooms release liquid and the sauce tightens in the oven. Stir the Parmesan in off the heat so it does not turn grainy.
Bread raspingsDried crusts grated fine: modern dry breadcrumbs, not fresh. They are what gives the crust its grit and colour.
Oven temperatureThis is a gratin, not a bake — the tongue and potato are already cooked. Ranhofer gives no temperature, only "put it in the oven to acquire a good color": in a modern oven that means a hot one, around 425F for 15–20 minutes, or run it under the broiler once heated through, until the top is well coloured.
YieldRanhofer gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a 3 lb tongue sliced will fill one or two gratin dishes and serve six to eight as a main course.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summation of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is built like a reference work: every preparation cross-referenced by number, so that a béchamel or a croquette mixture is invoked rather than repeated. Beef tongue recurs across the beef section, which says something about how the period regarded it — not a curiosity but a standard cut, cured red for the buffet and cold sideboard, then repurposed hot when there were leftovers. The à l'italienne tag in nineteenth-century French kitchens generally signalled a sauce built on chopped mushrooms and shallot (a duxelles) with ham and white wine, rather than anything drawn from Italian cooking as such; paired with au gratin and a piped potato border, it is the classic restaurant answer to the question of what to do with yesterday's braise.