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Curried Ox-Tongue
6 slices cooked ox-tongue 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls curry powder 6 chopped mushrooms 1 cupful brown sauce 1 dinner roll 1 egg 1 cupful boiled rice For tongue. Cut slices of tongue, fry in Crisco, season with 1/4 teaspoonful salt and curry powder, then add mushrooms, and brown sauce, simmer ten minutes. Cut large dinner roll into slices, and toast them lightly on both sides; dip them in egg well beaten then fry in hot Crisco and drain. Dish up slices of tongue alternately with fried slices of roll, pour sauce round base, and serve with boiled rice.
For brown sauce. Melt 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco, add 1 chopped onion, piece of carrot, 2 mushrooms, and fry a good brown color; stir in 2 tablespoonfuls flour and fry it also; then add 1 cupful stock or water and few drops of kitchen boquet. Let all cook ten minutes, stirring constantly add seasoning of salt and pepper, and strain for use. Sufficient for 6 slices.
A tidy re-heat dish built on already-cooked tongue, of the sort that turned a Sunday joint into Monday dinner. Most of the work is in the brown sauce.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, so it appears in every step. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works; butter or a butter-oil mix gives a better flavour in the sauce and on the fried bread.
- Cooked ox-tongueWhole salted beef tongue is a special order at most butchers now. Ready-cooked, pressed tongue sold sliced at delicatessens will serve; the recipe specifies only six slices, without thickness or weight.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still manufactured and sold near the gravy mixes. Its only job here is colour; a teaspoon of soy sauce or a little gravy browning does the same.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of this period were generally milder and more turmeric-led than many modern hot blends, though they varied. Bloom it in the fat with the tongue, as the recipe directs, rather than stirring it into the finished sauce, or it tastes raw and dusty.
- Don't overcook the tongueThe meat is already cooked. Ten minutes at a bare simmer is to warm it through and let it take up the sauce — a hard boil will squeeze it dry and tighten the texture.
- The dinner rollA large roll, cut into slices, toasted, dipped in beaten egg and fried: eggy-bread croutons in place of the fried bread croûtes of Victorian entrées. Fry them last so they reach the table crisp.
- Strain the sauceThe onion, carrot and mushroom in the brown sauce are aromatics only and are discarded at the straining. The six chopped mushrooms in the tongue pan are the ones you eat.
- YieldThe book says only 'Sufficient for 6 slices'; how many that feeds depends on whether it is served as a main dish or as a smaller entrée course.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's recipe book for a product that had only existed since 1911 — hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a clean, odourless, all-purpose substitute for lard and butter. The recipes were chosen to prove the fat could do everything, which is why a curried tongue entrée appears at all: it frys, it makes a roux, it deep-fries bread, all in one dish. Ox-tongue itself was a staple of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table on both sides of the Atlantic, usually brined, boiled, pressed in a mould and served cold, and this is a classic way of using the remains of one. The curry powder marks it as part of the long British colonial habit, absorbed into American cookbooks, of reviving cold meat with a mild curried brown sauce — dishes of this shape appear throughout nineteenth-century household manuals under names like curried beef or curry of cold meat.