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Boiled Tongue with Tomato Sauce
Mrs. J. Ellis.
Half boil a tongue, then stew it with a sauce made of a little broth, flour, parsley, one small onion, one small carrot, salt and pepper, and one can of tomatoes cooked and strained. Lay the tongue on a dish and strain the sauce over it.
A two-stage braise: the tongue is simmered until nearly done, then finished in a tomato-vegetable sauce. The original assumes you know how to handle a tongue, which is the part most cooks now need.
- Peel it hotThe one instruction the recipe omits. After the first boil, lift the tongue out and slip off the thick outer skin while it is still too hot to hold comfortably — a cloth helps. Once it cools the skin sets fast and will not come away cleanly. Trim the gristle and small bones at the root end at the same time.
- Fresh or curedA Victorian cook might reach for either. A fresh beef tongue goes straight into the pot; a salt-cured or pickled one should be soaked in several changes of cold water for 8-12 hours first, or the finished sauce will be inedibly salty. Hold back the salt in the sauce until you have tasted it.
- "Half boil" in real timeA 3-4 lb beef tongue takes roughly 2.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer to become fully tender. Half boiling means about 1.5 hours, enough to loosen the skin, with the braise finishing the job in another 45-60 minutes. It is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance — around 190F internally, well past the point where meat is merely cooked.
- One can of tomatoesCan sizes were not standardised in the 1870s; tins of tomatoes commonly ran somewhere between a pound and a quart, so the original quantity is approximate. A modern 28 oz can or a 14.5 oz can will both serve — with the larger, expect to reduce the sauce longer.
- The flourNo quantity is given. Two tablespoons cooked briefly in a little fat or in the broth will thicken about two cups of sauce. Since everything is strained at the end, lumps are forgiving, but a raw-flour taste is not — let it cook a few minutes before the tomatoes go in.
- StrainingThe onion, carrot and parsley are flavouring only and are discarded with the tomato seeds and skins. Cut them small so they give up their flavour in the time available, and push the sauce through a sieve rather than pouring it off, so you keep the tomato pulp.
- Serving and yieldA whole beef tongue serves 6-8. Slice it thin across the grain, starting at the tip, and fan the slices before saucing. It is equally good cold the next day, and the sauce sets to a light jelly.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children — generally credited as Canada's first fundraising cookbook, and full of signed contributions like Mrs. J. Ellis's here alongside unattributed and borrowed recipes. Boiled tongue was a standing fixture of the nineteenth-century table: cheap, sold by every butcher, impressive whole on a platter, and as useful cold on a sideboard as hot with sauce. What dates this particular version is the can. Commercially canned tomatoes had become widely and cheaply available in North America only in the decades after the Civil War, and recipes of the 1870s begin casually calling for "one can of tomatoes" the way an earlier cook would have specified a season and a bushel. The sauce itself — broth, flour, an onion, a carrot, parsley — is a plain domestic reading of the French sauce tomate that filtered into English-language household cookery through the middle of the century.