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Beef Tongue, Arlequin
Place a mirepoix in braising pan with two tablespoons lard and brown for ten minutes. Lay fresh beef tongue over the mirepoix, season with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, pour in a half gill white wine, pint water, three gills demi-glace, and boil for five minutes. Dilute a saltspoon saffron in tablespoon water and add to tongue, cover pan and set in oven for two hours and a half, basting and turning once in a while. Remove, take up tongue, plunge in cold water for five minutes, peel off skin and pare it all around, then cut in quarter-inch-thick slices and dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another. Cut three Spanish sweet red peppers in half-inch squares, place in a small saucepan with twelve sliced, canned mushrooms and six finely sliced pickles. Skim fat off surface, strain through a Chinese strainer into pan, let boil for ten minutes, pour sauce over tongue and serve.
A classic braise dressed up with saffron and a diced garnish. The recipe assumes a professional kitchen with stock on hand, and it leaves the oven temperature and the tongue's weight unstated.
- MirepoixRoughly diced onion, carrot and celery, browned in fat as the aromatic base of the braise. Figure on about two cups total for a tongue of three to four pounds.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup and three gills of demi-glace is 1 1/2 cups. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which is a great deal of saffron; a large pinch will colour and perfume the braise adequately.
- Demi-glaceClassically espagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced by half, a staple of a professional kitchen. Good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced homemade brown stock will do; ordinary canned broth will not give the body the finished sauce needs.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a covered braise of this kind a modern oven around 325F, with the liquid barely trembling rather than boiling, is a reasonable equivalent.
- TimingTwo and a half hours may suit a smaller tongue; a supermarket beef tongue of three to four pounds will often want longer. Test by pushing a skewer into the thickest part, which should meet no resistance.
- PeelingThis is the hinge. The rough outer skin slips off cleanly only while the tongue is still hot or barely warm, and the five-minute cold-water plunge is meant to make it handleable, not to chill it. Let it go cold and the skin bonds fast.
- The garnishSpanish sweet red peppers means pimientos, sold in jars; roasted red peppers substitute directly. The pickles are sour cucumber pickles, cut small, and they carry the acidity that cuts the rich sauce.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve works; press the vegetables lightly to extract the liquid but do not force the pulp through, or the sauce will turn cloudy.
- YieldA three- to four-pound tongue slices to serve six to eight. The sauce is generous; carve the tongue across the grain, thinner at the tip than at the butt.
Arlequin is Harlequin, the patchwork-costumed servant of the Italian commedia dell'arte, and in French kitchen usage the name is attached to dishes finished with an assortment of small, brightly contrasting garnishes: here the red pimiento, dark mushroom and pale green pickle scattered over saffron-tinted sauce. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) drew on his long service at Delmonico's in New York, and this is very much a restaurant recipe, written for a brigade that would already have demi-glace and a mirepoix at hand. Beef tongue itself needed no defence at the time; it was cheap, widely sold both fresh and pickled, and appeared boiled and cold on sideboards as often as it did braised and sauced. What dates the dish is not the cut but the treatment, the saffron and the confetti garnish being the sort of thing a chef added to move an offal braise onto a menu written in French.