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Fresh Beef Tongue, Gendarme
Wash well a fine, fresh, medium beef tongue. Slice one medium carrot, one onion, two branches celery, two ditto parsley, one clove sound garlic and one leek. Place all the vegetables in a large saucepan with half ounce butter, adding two cloves, one bay leaf, twelve allspice, eighteen whole black peppers and half teaspoon thyme. Brown the vegetables to a good brown colour, stirring well with a wooden spoon meanwhile, then lay the tongue over the vegetables, pour in one quart hot water, quarter of a pint claret, half pint tomato sauce and two gills demi-glace. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Cover the pan, and as soon as it comes to a boil place the pan in a moderate oven for two hours, being careful to turn the tongue once in a while. Take up the tongue and drop it into cold water for a minute, remove the skin and neatly trim it all around; keep it warm. Then place the pan on a brisk fire, reduce the sauce to a pint. Strain the sauce into another saucepan. Finely slice four medium, sound pickles, add six minced canned mushrooms; cut into small squares one red Spanish pepper and half ounce lean cooked ham, add to the strained sauce, mix well, boil for five minutes. Skim the fat off. Place the tongue on a hot dish, spread the sauce over and serve.
A hotel-style braised tongue finished with a sharp, pickle-flecked sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities are written in pre-metric restaurant shorthand and the cooking time is optimistic.
- The hinge: cook it until a skewer slides out cleanTwo hours at a moderate oven will not tenderise most beef tongues; a 3-4 lb tongue usually needs 3 to 4 hours of gentle braising. Judge by feel, not the clock, and top up with hot water if the liquid drops below the halfway mark.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is 350F/175C. For a long braise like this, 325F/165C is steadier and less likely to reduce the liquid too fast.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of demi-glace is one cup. A quarter of a pint of claret is half a cup, and half a pint of tomato sauce is one cup, using US measure. Claret simply means a dry red Bordeaux-style wine.
- Demi-glaceThe original assumes a stockpot of reduced brown sauce standing ready. A cup of well-reduced beef stock, or good commercial demi-glace concentrate made up strong, does the same job. Skip flour thickening; the reduction at the end supplies the body.
- Peeling the tongueThe cold-water dip loosens the skin, but do not let it go cold through. Peel while it is still hot enough to handle with a cloth, then trim the fat and gristle from the root end before slicing.
- Red Spanish pepperIn cookery of this period the term is usually taken to mean a sweet red pepper, of the sort now sold jarred or canned as pimiento. A roasted and peeled red bell pepper is the closest fresh equivalent.
- The picklesSour cucumber pickles, not sweet ones. Cornichons or dill gherkins give the required acidity; bread-and-butter pickles will make the sauce cloying.
- Whole spice quantitiesTwelve allspice and eighteen peppercorns look excessive but the sauce is strained, so the spice is infusion only. Leave them whole.
- Yield and servingA medium tongue serves six to eight. Slice on the diagonal from the thick end, arranging the leaner tip slices among the fatter ones, and spoon the sauce over rather than under.
The name marks the sauce, not the meat, and its logic is easier to taste than to trace: pickles, ham and hot pepper put the dish in the neighbourhood of sauce piquante and sauce charcutière, all of them relying on vinegar sharpness to cut rich braised meat, though the kinship is one of ingredients rather than documented lineage. Turn-of-the-century American hotel cookery, which this book speaks in fluently, took such names wholesale from the French brigade kitchen, where a standing pot of demi-glace made a dish like this a matter of assembly rather than construction. Beef tongue itself was ordinary rather than exotic then, a cheap cut that rewarded long moist cooking and turned out handsomely on a platter, and it appears in the large cookbooks of the period boiled, pickled, smoked or braised. Its retreat from American menus has more to do with squeamishness about recognisable organs than with any change in how good it tastes.