No. 1583

Calves' Tongues a la Flamande

Langues de Veau a la Flamande

To Salt the Calves' Tongues.—Take out the pipes from twelve tongues; prick them all over with a coarse trussing needle and put them into a stone vessel containing sixteen quarts. Dissolve a sufficiency of salt in ten quarts of water so that when an egg is dropped in, it will float on the top; add four ounces of saltpetre, and when all is thoroughly dissolved, pour it over the tongues. Set them in a cool place, and leave them there for twelve days turning them over every third one. Drain and cook them plainly in water with some chopped beef suet, and when done, peel off the skins and keep the tongue warm in a light half-glaze sauce (No. 413); dress and surround them with a Flemish garnishing (No. 668), pouring over a clear gravy (No. 404).

← No. 1582 Tendon or Gristle of Veal a la Biarritz Veal No. 1584 Calves' Tongues a la Perigueux →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's entry is really two procedures stacked: a twelve-day saltpetre cure, then a plain boil and a dressed service. The cure is the part that cannot be reproduced today, and the notes below explain why before touching the cookery.

The brine is unmeasurable"Dissolve a sufficiency of salt... so that when an egg is dropped in, it will float" is the old float test, and it brackets a very wide range of salinity depending on how much of the egg shows and how fresh the egg is. Nitrite and nitrate curing today is done by weight against the weight of the meat, not by buoyancy.
Four ounces of saltpetreSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Four ounces in ten quarts of brine gives no control at all over how much any individual tongue absorbs over twelve days, and nitrate uptake in a long wet cure is exactly what modern regulation limits. Curing salts are now formulated and dosed to a fixed parts-per-million precisely because this method could not be.
No temperature anywhere"Set them in a cool place" could mean a cellar at almost any temperature depending on the season. Twelve days of wet-cured meat at an unknown temperature is a setting for spoilage organisms, and unmeasured nitrate curing carries a risk of Clostridium botulinum. If you want salt-cured tongue, use a current recipe with weights and a measured refrigerator temperature.
What the "pipes" areThe gullet, windpipe stub and associated glandular tissue at the root of the tongue, trimmed away before curing. Any butcher selling whole tongues will already have done this or will do it on request.
A moment on scaleTwelve tongues in a sixteen-quart stone crock, as the recipe specifies, is a restaurant batch rather than a household one.
The cross-referencesNo. 413 is the light half-glaze sauce, No. 668 the Flemish garnishing and No. 404 the clear gravy. None of the three is printed here; the book assumed you had the whole volume open.
The suet in the cooking waterThe recipe gives no reason for the chopped beef suet; it enriches the poaching liquid, and is not structurally necessary.
PeelingThe skin comes off cleanly only while the tongue is hot. If it cools in the liquid the membrane sets and has to be cut away, taking meat with it.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its numbered, cross-referenced structure is the tell: it was written for a professional brigade working from a shared repertoire rather than for a home cook. Calves' tongue was a standard item on nineteenth-century restaurant menus, cheap in relation to its yield and improved by salting, which is why a recipe of this kind opens with a bulk cure for a dozen at once. A la flamande — in the Flemish manner — generally signals a garnish of braised cabbage with root vegetables, a treatment associated with the Low Countries and long absorbed into the French classical vocabulary. Saltpetre, used here for both preservation and the pink colour it fixes in cured meat, was the standard curing agent of the period; the shift to precisely dosed nitrite mixtures came later, as the chemistry of nitrate reduction in meat became understood.