No. 2609

Red Beef Tongues with Jelly

Langues de Boeuf Ecarlate a la Gelee

Cut away the fat and cartilaginous part from six beef tongues, wash and wipe them well, then prick them with a larding needle; rub each tongue over, using half an ounce of saltpetre for each one. Lay them in a bowl, covering them with a layer of salt; set a board over with a weight on top, and leave them there for twelve hours, then range them in an earthen vessel or wooden tub. Cover them with a brine prepared as follows: Have eight quarts of water and one pound or more of salt; test the brine, to see whether it be strong enough, by putting in an egg or potato, and if it floats on the surface then the brine is sufficiently strong. Boil it, adding half a pound of brown sugar, and let get cool before pouring it over the tongues; leave them in this pickle for twelve to fifteen days, setting them in a very cool place, and laying a board over with a weight on top so as to keep them continually under the brine, turning them over in it every three days; when they are to be used, place them in plenty of cold water, and set on the fire to boil for three or four hours according to their size; when done plunge them into fresh water, remove their skins, press them down under a weight, trim them nicely, then cut out the entire center of the tongue, leaving a piece underneath and at both ends; cut this square piece into thin slices, return them to their original position, then glaze the tongue with meat glaze (No. 402); dress it on a dish over a layer of bread spread with green butter (No. 583), and decorate it through a cornet with the same butter. Garnish around with chopped jelly, having a border of nicely shaped jelly croutons (No. 2442).

← No. 2608 Red Beef Tongues, Smoked Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2610 Valves' Tongues a la Macedoine →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a nitrate cure carried out over two weeks at an unspecified temperature, and both the curing salt dose and the storage conditions fall outside what is now considered safe. The notes below explain what the procedure involves and where it fails.

The saltpetre dose is far out of rangeHalf an ounce of potassium nitrate rubbed onto each tongue — a tongue weighing perhaps 2 to 3 lb — works out at something like five to ten times the nitrate level permitted in modern cured meat, and there is no way to know how much any individual tongue absorbs. Nitrate and nitrite are toxic in quantity, and the margin between a working cure and a dangerous one is a matter of a few ounces per hundred pounds of meat, not half-ounces applied by hand.
"A very cool place" is not a temperatureBrine curing depends on holding the meat below about 40F for the entire fifteen days. A nineteenth-century larder or cellar in winter might have managed it; nothing in the instruction guarantees it. Between the surface of a tub of brine and the centre of a thick tongue there is ample time and warmth for spoilage organisms, and this is precisely the low-oxygen, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum is a concern.
The egg-float test measures nothing usefulA floating egg tells you the brine is somewhere above roughly 10 percent salt. It does not tell you how much, and salt concentration is the one variable the whole cure hangs on. "One pound or more of salt" to eight quarts of water is a range, not a specification, and the brine dilutes further as the meat gives up its own liquid.
The long boil is not a rescueThree to four hours of boiling will certainly cook the tongue through. It does not remove nitrate, and while botulinum toxin itself is destroyed by prolonged boiling, the spores are not. Cooking at the end does not make an unsafe cure safe.
If you want cured tongueUse a current recipe with a measured commercial curing salt — the pink nitrite blends sold for the purpose — weighed against the weight of the meat, and a refrigerator held at a known temperature. Salted beef tongue is a perfectly ordinary thing to make; it just needs numbers this recipe does not supply.
What the finished dish looked likeFor context rather than instruction: the tongue is boiled, skinned, pressed flat under a weight, then hollowed out so the centre can be sliced and laid back in place, giving neat overlapping slices that still read as a whole tongue. Meat glaze (Ranhofer's No. 402) is reduced stock brushed on for shine; green butter (No. 583) is butter worked with blanched, pounded herbs, piped through a paper cornet. The chopped aspic and cut jelly croutons around the base are pure garnish.
YieldSix tongues is banquet scale. As a cold buffet centrepiece, one dressed tongue serves ten to twelve.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is a working record of that restaurant's repertoire rather than a domestic cookbook — which is why a recipe casually opens with six beef tongues. Écarlate, "scarlet," is the standard French term for saltpetre-cured meat: the potassium nitrate is reduced to nitrite, which in turn reacts with the muscle pigment to fix a bright pink-red that survives boiling, and the colour was the entire point of the treatment on a cold buffet, where a grey tongue looked like a mistake. Tongue held an odd position in the period's dining: cheap enough, it is often said, to be a servants' dish and a sandwich filling, but pressed, glazed and set on a layer of bread with piped herb butter and chopped aspic, it became a centrepiece of exactly the kind Victorian and Belle Époque banquet cookery prized — a display piece meant to be looked at from a distance before it was carved. The elaborate garnishing chapters of The Epicurean reflect a service style, à la russe, in which cold dishes stood dressed on the sideboard throughout a long meal.