Home › A Calendar of Dinners › April 20
April 20
Menu: Celery Soup; Braised Ox-Tongue; Baked Potatoes Mashed Turnips; Cold Slaw Cheese Wafers; Rice Mousse Coffee Braised Ox-Tongue-1 ox-tongue, 1 pint stock, 1 onion, 1 small carrot, 1 bouquet garni, 1 clove, 1½ pint piquante sauce, and 6 thin slices bacon. Trim ox-tongue, which should be obtained salted or pickled ready for use. Blanch, and let it cool. Put into fish-kettle or stewpan, large enough to hold tongue, slices bacon, onion peeled and sliced, carrot scraped and cut in pieces, bouquet garni and clove; add stock, put in tongue, and cook until three parts done, then take it up, and skin while hot. Strain liquor it was cooked in, take off fat, add piquante sauce, put tongue into this, and finish cooking. When tender, cut in slices, dish, and pour sauce over, and serve. Mashed potatoes, spinach, or peas served with tongue is a great improvement. The piquante sauce is made as follows: 4 shallots, 3 mushrooms, 1 bay leaf, 1/2 carrot, sprig thyme, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 4 tablespoons vinegar, half pint brown stock, 1/2 teaspoon anchovy extract, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, 3 tablespoons flour, salt and red pepper to taste. Peel and chop shallots, carrot, and mushrooms; melt Crisco in a saucepan; fry vegetables a nice brown; then add vinegar, bay leaf, and thyme. Reduce vinegar to half the quantity; stir in flour, dilute with stock, bring to boil; then add anchovy extract, Worcestershire sauce, salt and red pepper to taste. Take out thyme and bay leaf. Simmer for 10 minutes. Skim, and use as required.
A long, forgiving braise that turns on two things: buying the tongue already cured, and peeling it the moment it comes out of the pot. Everything else is timing.
- Skin it hotThe tough outer membrane slips off in one piece while the tongue is steaming; let it cool and it welds itself to the meat. Hold it in a towel, slit the skin along the underside, and pull. Trim the gristle and small bones at the root end at the same time.
- Salted or pickled tongueThe recipe assumes a brine-cured tongue from the butcher, which is why it calls for blanching first. Modern cured tongue is usually nitrite-brined and can be very salty; soak it in cold water for several hours, changing the water once, then bring to a boil, discard that water, and proceed. Fresh tongue works too but wants extra salt in the braising liquid.
- "Three parts done"About three quarters of the total cooking. The recipe gives no weight or timings; as a rough modern guide a 3 to 4 lb tongue takes something like 3 to 3½ hours at a bare simmer altogether, so take it out at roughly two thirds to three quarters of that to skin it, then return it to the sauce for the last stretch. It is done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest part.
- Fish-kettleAny deep, lidded pot long enough to hold the tongue lying flat and covered by liquid. A large oval Dutch oven or a stockpot is the equivalent. A pint of stock will not cover it; top up with water so the tongue stays submerged.
- Crisco and the rouxCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, in the book because the book exists to sell it. Butter, beef dripping or a neutral oil all work. Note that 3 tablespoons flour to 2 tablespoons fat is a dry roux; use 3 tablespoons fat, or expect the flour to clump when the stock goes in.
- Anchovy extract and red pepperAnchovy extract was a bottled savoury essence; a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed oil-packed fillets, gives the same salty depth. "Red pepper" in this period means cayenne, not paprika or sweet peppers, and a pinch is enough alongside the vinegar and Worcestershire.
- Bouquet garniParsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, or bundled in a square of muslin so it can be lifted out cleanly before the liquor is strained.
- DegreasingTongue throws a good deal of fat. Chilling the strained liquor makes the fat lift off in a sheet, and the sauce is much better for it; if you are working straight through, skim with a ladle and blot the surface with paper.
- Yield and carvingA whole ox tongue serves eight to ten. Slice across the grain, thin, working from the tip back — the mid-section gives the neatest slices. Any leftovers press well in a small bowl under a weight and slice cold the next day.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, two years after Crisco went on sale. Procter & Gamble's Calendar of Dinners, a separate Crisco publication, offered a year of menus built to prove the new shortening could do everything butter and lard did. That explains why a solidly British dish like braised ox-tongue with sauce piquante appears in an American promotional cookbook: the calendar was assembled from the standard repertoire of the day, with Crisco written into every recipe that used fat. Salted tongue itself was a fixture of Victorian and Edwardian tables on both sides of the Atlantic, sold ready-brined by butchers, served hot with a sharp brown sauce or pressed in a mould and eaten cold at supper and on cold sideboards. The sauce is a domesticated sauce piquante with vinegar and shallots, part of the classical French repertoire that English cookery had absorbed by the mid-nineteenth century — here reinforced with the bottled Worcestershire and anchovy that British kitchens of the period reached for as a matter of course.