No. 1819

Pigs' Tongues, Provencal Style

Langues de Cochon a la Provencale

Prepare and cook some salted tongues; when they are cold cut them lengthwise in two. Pare eight peeled onions by cutting off the roots and stalks on the slant; mince them up finely and fry colorless in oil, moisten with stock (No. 194a) and white wine, add salt, pepper, a clove of garlic and a garnished bunch of parsley (No. 123); boil and cook on a slow fire for one hour then remove all the fat and the parsley, and reduce with some thick bechamel (No. 409), pass through a tammy. When this is cold cover each half tongue on the flat side with a part of this preparation after paring them all one size; besprinkle with some gastrite (No. 1187), heat and brown in the oven to a fine color, then dress in a circle and fill the inside with sauted sweet peppers (No. 2769), and around with stuffed onions (No. 2766). A tomato sauce (No. 549) and half-glaze sauce (No. 413) reduced together is to be served separately.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's plate built from cured pig tongues, an onion soubise bound with béchamel, and a gratin finish. The cross-references send you elsewhere in Ranhofer, so most of the work is in reading between the numbers.

The hinge: peel the tongues while hotSalted (brine-cured) tongues must be soaked in several changes of cold water to draw out excess salt, then simmered gently until a skewer slides in freely — for pig tongues that is often around two hours, though it varies with size. Slip off the rough outer skin as soon as they are cool enough to handle; once cold it clings and tears the meat.
What the onion preparation actually isEight onions sweated colorless in oil, moistened with stock and white wine, simmered an hour and then reduced with thick béchamel is a soubise in all but name. Cook it down until it mounds on a spoon, or it will slide off the tongue halves in the oven.
TammyA tammy is a fine woolen straining cloth, worked by twisting the ends between two people. A drum sieve, a fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a short pass in a blender followed by a sieve gives the same smooth purée.
GastriteRanhofer's No. 1187 is his standard gratinating preparation for browning a surface under heat. Failing the original, fine dry breadcrumbs mixed with a little melted butter, or breadcrumbs with grated Parmesan, will brown the same way — the point is a thin crust, not a topping.
Oven heat for the gratinThe dish is already cooked; the oven only sets and colors the crust. Ranhofer names no temperature: use a hot oven on an upper rack, or the broiler with the pan a few inches down, and watch it — the béchamel purée scorches before the crumbs are properly gold if left too long.
The sauce"Half-glaze" is demi-glace. Reduced with tomato sauce it becomes a sauce tomatée; a good reduced brown veal stock stirred with a well-cooked tomato sauce is the modern equivalent, and it is served in a boat, not over the tongues.
Garnished bunch of parsleyNo. 123 is Ranhofer's bouquet garni — parsley stems tied with thyme and bay, sometimes with a scrap of celery. Remove it with the garlic clove before reducing.
Quantity and yieldThe original names no number of tongues; eight onions of soubise will comfortably coat six to eight tongues, giving twelve to sixteen halves. Pig tongues are small, so figure two halves per person as a course, with the peppers and stuffed onions doing real work on the plate.
SourcingCured pig tongues are a butcher or Latin/Eastern European market item rather than a supermarket one. Fresh tongues can be brined at home, but that is a separate, measured operation and not what this recipe describes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book's ambition was to set down the whole of French grande cuisine as it was practiced for an American clientele — which meant pig tongues sat in the same volume as terrapin and truffled capon. The label à la provençale is used loosely here: there is no olive-and-anchovy business, only garlic, olive oil, tomato and sweet peppers, which by the late nineteenth century were enough to signal the south of France on a menu. The structure — a cheap cured cut, sliced flat, masked with a bound purée, gratinated and dressed in a ring with garnish inside — is standard garde-manger economy dressed up for service, and the same treatment appears across the period applied to lamb tongues, sweetbreads and calf's brains. Soubise itself is generally traced to the eighteenth-century Prince de Soubise, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented.