No. 2607

Red Beef Tongues Arcade

Langues de Boeuf Ecarlate en Arcade

Prepare and cook the tongues in water, lay them in a mold having the shape of a tongue two and a quarter inches thick, then place them under a weight to get cool; pare, and cover them with a brown chaudfroid (No. 594) and decorate with designs of egg-white, truffles and pistachio nuts.

Mask the decoration with a partly solidified jelly, and arrange these tongues on a silver-plated support, as represented in the accompanying Fig. 534; garnish around with chopped jelly and a border of jelly croutons.

← No. 2606 Beef Tongue a la Rochefort Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2608 Red Beef Tongues, Smoked →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a finishing and presentation formula rather than a cooking one: the tongues are already cured and boiled, and the work here is pressing, coating and decorating. Two cross-references carry most of the weight, so read them first.

What "écarlate" meansScarlet, from the saltpetre brine that keeps cured tongue pink. The colour comes from the pickle, not from anything done at this stage. If you are curing from raw, use a current recipe with weighed nitrite curing salt; the older brine formulas in this book give proportions that are not measured to modern standards.
Cook and peel while hotA cured tongue needs 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer for a 3 lb piece, until a skewer slides out with no resistance. Skin it the moment it comes out of the liquid; once cool the tough outer membrane will not come away cleanly.
The press is the hingeTrimmed tongue goes into the mould still warm, weighted, and stays weighted until fully cold, ideally overnight in the refrigerator. This is what makes the meat hold together for clean slicing; the two and a quarter inches in the recipe is the depth of the tongue-shaped mould, not the thickness of a slice. Skip the pressing and no amount of decoration will hold.
Chaudfroid, No. 594A brown chaudfroid is espagnole or a strong brown stock reduced, enriched, and set with gelatin, then cooled to the point where it coats a spoon thickly without setting solid. Apply it to a thoroughly chilled tongue in two or three thin passes rather than one thick one; the coats should be cold before the next goes on.
"Partly solidified jelly"Aspic at the syrupy stage, thickening but still fluid, is what fixes the decoration. Too warm and it washes the truffle and egg-white off; too cool and it goes on in streaks. Keep the bowl over a pan of tepid water and work quickly.
Decorating materialsEgg-white means the whites of hard-boiled eggs, cut into shapes; pistachios are blanched and peeled for colour. Truffle can be replaced with black olive paste or thin rounds of olive for the same graphic effect at a fraction of the cost.
En arcade and the supportThe tongues are stood in an arch against a raised base, which in an 1890s hotel kitchen was a silver socle or an ornamental stand. A shallow oval platter with a shaped block of set aspic or a piece of trimmed bread as a hidden plinth gives the same line.
Chopped jelly and croutonsChopped jelly is firm aspic broken up with a knife; jelly croûtons are the same aspic set in a shallow tray and cut into triangles or diamonds. Both want a firmer set than the coating jelly, so use the aspic at full strength and keep it cold until service.
YieldThe recipe does not say how many tongues are used. This is a buffet piece rather than a plated dish, and it should go out cold but not straight from the refrigerator, or the chaudfroid tastes of nothing.

A Little History

Chaudfroid work of this kind was the heart of the cold buffet in the late nineteenth-century grand hotel, and Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, filled a long chapter of The Epicurean (1894) with it. The point of a piece like this was not flavour but silhouette: numbered figures, silver socles and mirrored trays let a single kitchen mount a display that guests read from across the room. Scarlet tongue itself was much older and far humbler -- brine-cured beef tongue was a standard preserved meat in English and American households long before it reached a Delmonico's buffet -- and dressing it en arcade, in an arch, is exactly the kind of architectural conceit that separated restaurant garde-manger work from the domestic larder. The heavy weighting and moulding served a practical end too, since a pressed tongue carves into even rounds and keeps its shape through a long service in a room without refrigeration.