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Stewed Tongue
Mrs. J. Ellis.
Cut square fillets of bacon, which dredge with a mixture of chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and a little allspice. Lard the tongue with the fillets; put in a sauce-pan two ounces of bacon cut in slices, four sprigs of parsley, two of thyme, a little garlic, two cloves, two carrots cut in small pieces, two small onions, salt and pepper. Lay the tongue on the whole; wet with a glass of white wine and a glass of broth. Set it on a moderate fire and simmer about five hours, keeping it well covered. Put the tongue on a dish and strain the sauce over it.
A braise of larded beef tongue in wine and broth. The long simmer is not an exaggeration — tongue is dense muscle and genuinely wants four to five hours — but the recipe assumes you already know two things it never says: how to skin the tongue, and how much liquid a covered pan needs.
- The hinge: the skinA tongue's outer membrane is tough and unpleasant to eat. One common approach is to blanch the tongue 15–20 minutes, cool it enough to handle, and peel the rough skin away before larding and braising; the alternative is to peel after the braise, though the seasoning will then have stayed on the surface rather than in the meat.
- Buying itA fresh (unpickled) beef tongue commonly runs 3 to 4 lb and may need ordering from a butcher. Veal tongues are smaller, around 1 lb, and cook considerably faster. Cured or corned tongue is a different product, better soaked and simmered plain than braised in wine.
- "Lard the tongue with the fillets"This means inserting the seasoned bacon batons into the meat with a larding needle, not draping them on top. Without a larding needle, cut deep slits with a thin knife and push the bacon in with the handle of a wooden spoon.
- A glassIn this period a wine glass is roughly 2 fl oz and a tumbler 8 fl oz; "a glass" here is most likely somewhere between, and the amount is genuinely ambiguous. For a 3–4 lb tongue in a tight-lidded pan, enough wine and broth to come a third of the way up the meat will hold for five hours; check once an hour and top up with broth.
- "A moderate fire"A bare simmer — the surface should just tremble. On a modern burner that is the lowest useful setting; a heavy covered pot in a low oven is easier to hold steady for five hours than a stovetop flame.
- DonenessTime is a guide, not a test. A skewer or thin knife should slide into the thickest part with no resistance at all; tongue that meets any spring still needs another 30–45 minutes.
- The sauceStraining leaves a thin, very savory liquid. Skim the fat, then reduce it hard in a wide pan — five hours of bacon and mirepoix gives it plenty of body once the volume is down by half.
- Serving and yieldSlice across the grain, thin at the tip and thicker toward the root. A 3–4 lb tongue serves six to eight; cold leftovers slice beautifully the next day.
Tongue was a standard, unremarkable cut in nineteenth-century North American households — cheap, keeping well when corned, and substantial enough to carry a Sunday table — and cookbooks of the era treat it with none of the apology it would need now. What sets this version apart is its method: larding with seasoned bacon, a bed of aromatics, wine and broth, and a long covered simmer is the classic French braise, and the phrasing ("lard the tongue with the fillets," "wet with a glass of white wine") suggests it came through one of the many translated or paraphrased French cookery manuals circulating in the 1870s — though community and subscription cookbooks of this period routinely reprinted recipes lifted from published sources, which may be the likelier explanation. The Home Cook Book, first published in Toronto in 1877, was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why the recipe carries Mrs. J. Ellis's name rather than an author's.