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Lamb Tongues, Bergere
Have in a saucepan one quart boiling water with one teaspoon salt. Plunge in twelve fine, fat, fresh lamb's tongues and boil for ten minutes. Drain on a sieve, remove the skins, trim nicely, split in two and keep on a plate. Remove the stalks from two quarts very fresh sorrel, wash in three changes of fresh water, lift up with the hands and carefully press out the water. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add the drained sorrel, cover the pan and let cook for ten minutes, occasionally mixing with a fork meanwhile. Press through a wire sieve and replace in the pan. Season with half teaspoon salt, a teaspoon sugar and a saltspoon white pepper, adding half ounce good butter; gently heat for five minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile; shift to the corner of the range and keep hot.
Heat a tablespoon melted lard in a frying pan; add the tongues, season with half teaspoon salt and briskly fry for five minutes on each side. Dress the sorrel in the centre of a hot dish, arrange the tongues on top, pour a hot piquante sauce, over all and serve.
A French bistro plate — fried tongue on sorrel purée — filtered through a Delmonico's kitchen. Two things in the original will trip you up: the boiling time and the amount of sorrel.
- The tongues need far longer than ten minutesTen minutes of boiling will neither loosen the skin nor tenderize the meat; tongue is dense muscle that only softens with long, gentle cooking. Simmer lamb tongues 1 to 1½ hours until a skewer slides in easily, then peel while still hot — the skin comes away in sheets and is nearly impossible to remove once cold. The five minutes per side in the pan is browning, not cooking.
- Two quarts of sorrelMeasured as loose untrimmed leaves, that is roughly ¾ to 1 lb, which collapses to about a cup of purée. Sorrel wilts more dramatically than spinach; do not scale it down.
- Cook sorrel in stainless or enamelSorrel is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare cast iron and aluminium and turns the purée grey and metallic. It also breaks down to a khaki-green almost immediately — that is normal and no amount of care prevents it.
- Old measuresA saltspoon is about ¼ teaspoon. "Half ounce good butter" is one tablespoon. "Two tablespoons melted butter" means the butter is melted before measuring; about two tablespoons of solid butter.
- "Shift to the corner of the range"On a coal range the corner was the cool zone. Use the lowest burner setting or a water bath to hold the purée without it scorching or thinning.
- Lard, and the fryingSubstitute clarified butter or a neutral oil if you prefer; lard gives the cleanest browning. Pat the peeled tongue halves dry first or they will steam rather than colour.
- Sauce piquanteThe book assumes you already have it: a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallots and chopped gherkins or capers. Any well-reduced demi-glace finished with vinegar and cornichons serves.
- Sourcing and yieldLamb tongues are an order-ahead item from a halal butcher or a whole-animal shop; twelve tongues weigh around 2 lb and serve six as a first course, four as a main.
"Berg ess" is French for shepherdess, and in nineteenth-century kitchen usage it suggested a dish of humble, pastoral materials hough in classical French usage the name is generally attached to a fixed garnish of mushrooms with onion and straw potatoes. Pairing lamb with sorrel is older and more practical than the name: sorrel's oxalic sharpness cuts fat the way a squeeze of lemon does, which is why the pur ee was standard alongside rich meats and oily fish. This recipe's presence in The International Cook Book reflects the book's project of gathering restaurant French cooking for American households at a time when a whole lamb was butchered and sold nose to tail, and tongues, hearts and sweetbreads were ordinary market goods rather than specialty orders. The instruction to shift the pan "to the corner of the range" places it in a solid-fuel kitchen, where heat was controlled by moving the pot, not the flame.