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Smoked Beef Tongue Aux Ravioli
Plunge a medium smoked beef tongue in one and a half gallons boiling water and boil two and a half hours. Remove, pare and remove the skin. Slice in quarter-inch slices. Mix in a bowl one ounce butter, three tablespoons bread crumbs, half teaspoon chopped parsley, half bean chopped garlic, four finely chopped shallots, one egg yolk, two saltspoons salt and saltspoon pepper; then spread the mixture at bottom of a baking dish, place slices over, one overlapping another, arrange a ravioli on top of the tongue. Pour a sauce Italienne over all. Sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese on top. Set in oven twenty-five minutes. Remove and serve.
A Delmonico's-style composed dish that assumes you already have cooked ravioli and a pot of sauce Italienne on hand. Read it as an assembly recipe and do the two components first.
- The hinge: peel the tongue hotThe skin lifts off cleanly only while the tongue is still steaming. Let it cool and you will be cutting the skin away with a knife and losing meat with it. Lift it out, rinse briefly in cold water so you can handle it, and strip the skin immediately.
- Smoked tongue and saltA cured, smoked tongue can be aggressively salty. Taste the cooking water after 30 minutes; if it is brine-like, drain, refill with fresh boiling water and continue. Two and a half hours suits a 3 lb tongue — test with a skewer, which should meet no resistance at the thick end.
- Saltspoon and beanA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper for the stuffing keep it light given the cured meat. "Half bean chopped garlic" means half a clove; "bean" for a single garlic clove is common in cookbooks of this period.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350–375F, for the stated 25 minutes is right: everything in the dish is already cooked and you are only heating through and browning the cheese.
- Sauce ItalienneIn this period this generally means a brown sauce (demi-glace) finished with a duxelles of mushroom and shallot, white wine, often tomato and chopped ham, with parsley added at the end. About 2 cups is enough to coat the dish. A good mushroom-and-wine reduced brown sauce will stand in.
- The ravioli"Arrange a ravioli" means a layer of ravioli, boiled and drained first. Fresh or dried meat or cheese ravioli, cooked just short of done, will finish in the oven without going slack.
- The crumb mixtureOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons, and the raw egg yolk binds the crumbs into a paste. Spread it thin over the base of the baking dish; it is a savoury lining, not a stuffing, and will set under the meat.
- YieldA medium tongue sliced this way serves six to eight as a main course. Leftover boiled tongue keeps three or four days refrigerated and slices better cold.
Beef tongue was standard restaurant and household meat in 1900, cheap, sold both fresh and pickled-and-smoked, and treated with none of the squeamishness it meets now. What marks this version as belonging to the grand hotel kitchens is the pairing: an economical cured cut dressed with a classical French brown sauce (sauce italienne, built on demi-glace and mushroom duxelles) and a layer of Italian ravioli, with Parmesan over the top. That collision — French technique as the grammar, Italian pasta as vocabulary — is the whole premise of the dish.