No. 2610

Valves' Tongues a la Macedoine

Langues de Veau a la Macedoine

Cook six calves' tongues, salted as the beef tongue No. 2609, in salted water for eight days, and unsalted in fresh water for six hours; when done remove and lay them to cool under a weight. After suppressing the skin, pare them rounded at the thick end, and cut the two surfaces off straight, then split each one lengthwise in two or three, brush over with meat glaze (No. 402) and cover with a little half-set jelly to give them brilliancy. Besides this prepare a vegetable macedoine with Brussels sprouts, small clusters of cauliflower, balls of potatoes and carrots, string beans sliced or cut in lozenges, asparagus tops and green peas; all of these vegetables should be blanched separately; season the salad and form it symmetrically into a pyramid on the middle of a dish. Dress the halved tongues upright in a circle around with their pointed ends upward, and surround the whole with jelly, serving a tartar sauce No. (631), or cold ravigote (No. 623) apart.

← No. 2609 Red Beef Tongues with Jelly Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2611 Brook Trout a la Careme →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A cold-buffet centrepiece from Ranhofer's The Epicurean: brined calves' tongues, glazed and stood upright around a mound of dressed vegetables. The construction is straightforward, but the curing step it leans on cannot be followed safely from what is printed here.

The brine is the problemThe recipe does not cure the tongues itself; it defers to No. 2609 for the salting, then holds them eight days in "salted water" with no salt concentration, no cure composition and no storage temperature given. Period beef-tongue brines of this type were built on salt with saltpetre or other nitrate, and nitrate curing is dosage-controlled work: too little gives no protection against Clostridium botulinum in a low-oxygen brine, too much is a health hazard in its own right. An eight-day wet cure held at an unstated temperature is exactly the situation modern guidance is written to prevent. If you want brined tongue, work from a current recipe with weighed cure and a measured refrigerator temperature.
And the holding afterwardsOnce cured, cooked, pressed under a weight, glazed and dressed, the finished platter is designed to sit out on a cold buffet for the length of a service. Sliced cooked meat coated in aspic is a well-known vehicle for Listeria and staphylococcal growth at room temperature, and the jelly seals the surface rather than protecting it.
What a macedoine isNot a fruit salad in this context but a mixture of vegetables cut to uniform small shapes -- here left partly whole, with potato and carrot turned into balls and beans cut into lozenges. The point is visual regularity, which is why each vegetable is blanched separately: they cook at different rates and the colours would muddy in one pot.
Meat glazeNo. 402 is glace de viande, brown stock reduced until it sets to a sticky, near-black syrup. Brushed on, it gives the cut surfaces colour and gloss; the "half-set jelly" over it is aspic caught at the point where it coats without running.
Seasoning the salad"Season the salad" means dressing the blanched vegetables before they are moulded; Ranhofer does not say with what, and a macedoine of this kind was dressed with either a vinaigrette or a mayonnaise.
The saucesTartare here is the classic mayonnaise-based sauce with capers, gherkins and herbs. Cold ravigote is a herb-heavy vinaigrette with shallot, capers and sometimes chopped egg -- both are sent to table separately, as the recipe specifies.
ScaleSix calves' tongues, each split in two or three, gives twelve to eighteen upright pieces: a platter for a table of twelve or more, not a domestic supper.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the cold-dish chapters record a style of service the restaurant did as well as anyone: the buffet froid, where food was as much architecture as cookery. Tongue was the natural material for it -- cheap, dense, fine-grained, and it slices and holds a shape after pressing better than almost any other cut. Curing in brine was the ordinary way to keep tongue before mechanical refrigeration was general, and the pink colour that made the finished pieces attractive against green vegetables came from the nitrate in the cure rather than from the meat itself. The whole assembly, glazed and surrounded with jelly, belongs to the same tradition as the chaud-froid and the moulded galantine: dishes built to be looked at down the length of a long table before anyone touched them.