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Calves' Tongues En Papillotes
Place a mirepoix in a saucepan and lay over it three fresh calves' tongues. Moisten with three quarts water, adding a tablespoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, cover pan, and let gently boil on range for one hour and ten minutes. Take up the tongues, skin, neatly trim, and cut each in two lengthwise. Prepare an Italian sauce adding three tablespoons bread crumbs, mix well and keep on table.
Broil twelve very thin slices ham two minutes on each side and keep on a plate. Have six sheets white paper sixteen inches square, fold in two, then cut in heart shape the length and width of pan, and lightly oil both sides. Place a slice of ham on one side of paper, spread a tablespoon Italian sauce and lay a piece of tongue on top of same; spread another tablespoon of sauce over the tongue, arrange another piece of ham on top, and fold up the two edges together firmly, so as to entirely envelop articles. Proceed the same with others, place on a roasting tin, set in oven ten minutes, remove, dress on a dish and serve.
A dish of two halves: a long wet simmer, then a brief bake in paper. Filippini assumes you can make his Italian sauce from elsewhere in the book and that you own sheets of clean kitchen paper, so both need translating.
- Skin the tongues hotThe rough outer skin peels away cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming; once cool it grips and has to be cut off, taking good meat with it. Lift them from the broth one at a time, hold with a cloth, and slit the skin from tip to root.
- Test rather than timeOne hour ten minutes suits small fresh calves' tongues; larger ones, and anything sold pickled or corned, will want 1½ to 2 hours. They are done when a skewer slides into the thickest part with no resistance. Undercooked tongue does not improve in the paper.
- MirepoixHere it means the aromatic bed for the simmering liquid, not a garnish: roughly cut onion, carrot and celery, with a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. It is discarded, though the strained broth is worth keeping.
- Italian sauceIn this period sauce italienne is a duxelles of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots cooked down in oil or butter with white wine, then bound with a brown sauce or demi-glace and finished with chopped parsley. The three tablespoons of breadcrumbs stirred in at the end most likely serve to stiffen it, so that it stays put in the paper rather than running out.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A hot oven, in the region of 400 to 425F, will suit: the papers want to puff and colour in ten minutes, and everything inside is already cooked.
- Paper and foldingUse parchment, not writing paper, and cut the hearts as described so the fold runs along the curve. Brush lightly with oil, then crimp the open edge in small overlapping pleats and twist the point under. Foil works but will not brown or balloon.
- The hamVery thin slices of cooked ham, broiled just to firm them. Two minutes a side under a modern broiler is ample; any longer and it dries and turns leathery inside the parcel.
- Yield and servingSix parcels, one apiece as a main course with three tongues divided between them. Bring them to the table unopened and slit each one at the table, or the aroma is wasted.
En papillote — in a paper wrapper — was a standard restaurant device by the time Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book in 1906: the heart-shaped sheet, oiled and pleated, appears in French professional manuals through the nineteenth century as a way of serving something already cooked while it was still fragrant and steaming. Tongue was an unremarkable cut then, sold fresh, pickled or smoked at any butcher's, and calves' tongues were generally reckoned smaller and more delicate than beef. The combination here is of its period: a cut simmered until tender, dressed with a mushroom-and-wine sauce built on the kitchen's standing brown sauce, and then presented with a flourish that costs nothing but a sheet of paper. That tongue has since moved from the everyday to the specialist counter says more about changing squeamishness than about the meat.