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Fresh Beef Tongue with Risotto
Place a mirepoix in a braising pan and lay a small fresh beef tongue over. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, adding half pint water, half pint demi-glace and half pint tomato sauce. Cover the pan, let boil for ten minutes, then set in the oven for one hour and forty-five minutes. Remove, plunge the tongue in cold water for five minutes, take up, remove the skin with a coarse towel and neatly turn all around. Prepare and dress a risotto on a large hot dish, place the tongue on top of the rice, skim the fat from the surface of the gravy, strain the gravy over the tongue and serve.
A straightforward oven braise, but the original assumes a professional kitchen with demi-glace on hand and gives no oven temperature. Two details need attention: the cooking time and the peeling.
- Cook it until it yields, not by the clockAn hour and three-quarters is short for a whole beef tongue; even a small one is likely to want two and a half to four hours at a low braise, until a skewer slides through the thickest part with no resistance.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a covered braise of this kind a modern oven at about 325F suits, low enough that the liquid barely trembles.
- MirepoixRoughly diced onion, carrot and celery, often with a bay leaf and thyme, cut coarse because it is a flavour base and is discarded with the strained gravy. Allow about two cups total for one tongue.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced by half, a standing item in a professional kitchen and a project in a domestic one. A well-reduced homemade brown stock is the honest substitute; commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to half a pint works and is already salty, so hold back on the teaspoon of salt until you taste the finished gravy.
- "A small fresh beef tongue"Fresh means unpickled and uncured, as distinct from the corned or smoked tongues sold in the same period. A small one runs 2 to 3 lb; anything larger will need a proportionally longer braise and more liquid.
- PeelingThe cold-water plunge firms the surface for handling, but the skin lifts most easily while the tongue is still hot, so work quickly. Split the tough outer membrane along the underside with a knife tip and it peels off in sheets. "Neatly turn all around" means trimming the root end of gristle, small bones and fat so the tongue presents as a clean, even shape.
- SkimmingTongue renders a good deal of fat. Let the strained gravy settle a minute and lift the fat with a ladle or a folded paper towel; unskimmed, it will pool greasily over the rice.
- The risottoAn Italian-style rice, cooked in stock with onion and finished with butter and grated cheese. Keep it loose rather than stiff, since it has to carry a strained gravy poured over the top.
- YieldA 2 to 3 lb tongue, carved in thin slices on the diagonal from the tip back, serves about four to six with the rice.
Beef tongue was standard butcher's fare rather than a curiosity for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sold fresh, corned or smoked, and it appears throughout period cookbooks in every register from boiled-and-pressed for the sideboard to elaborate braises like this one. The pairing with risotto and the reliance on demi-glace and tomato sauce mark this as hotel cooking in the French manner with an Italian garnish, the sort of dish a large kitchen could assemble because the mother sauces were already simmering. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it generally reads like a professional's shorthand: the technique is exact where it matters to a trained cook and silent on everything a trained cook would already know, including the oven temperature.