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Hodge-Podge
(England.) Cut a neck of mutton, about 6 pounds, and cut into chops, except the scrag end, which use whole. Add to both 1/2 pint water, 6 small onions, cut in halves, 6 turnips and 2 carrots, cut into dice and 1/4 of a cabbage, sliced. Simmer for 1/2 hour, add 2 ounces barley and some herbs. Cook until the meat is tender, take out the scrag, and strain the sauce over the meat and vegetables on a dish. Serve with thick slices of toasted bran bread. This is a very old recipe for family stew.
BEEF TONGUE (as cooked in Alsace-Lorraine.) Boil a tongue until tender in some stock. Drain, cool it, and remove the skin and uneven end. Cover it with egg and bread-crumbs and bake it 1/2 hour, basting it with 1 cup of port wine. Make a puree of chestnuts by boiling, peeling, and chopping 1 quart, adding sufficient white stock and seasoning, and a pinch of mace. Press through a sieve; it will look like vermicelli. Place the tongue on top, and serve hot, with a good sauce made of tomatoes, onions, herbs, bacon, etc.
BEEF TONGUE (as cooked in Italy.) Boil and slice in strips a tongue; put it in a dish with a sauce made of 3 minced onions, fried in butter with a teaspoonful of flour, 2 of lemon juice, and a cupful of chopped mushrooms. Boil this 10 minutes, and pour over, adding breadcrumbs on top and bits of butter. Bake 20 minutes, and serve with spinach, or peas, or spaghetti cooked with tomatoes and cheese. BEEF TONGUE (as cooked in France.) Parboil and skin a tongue. Add one pint of white broth, parsley, thyme, a clove, 1 onion, 1 carrot, and a turnip. Cook for 2 hours. Cool it, and slice it in 12 pieces, across. Arrange in the original shape with a forcemeat between, of 4 ounces bread, soaked in milk, some mushrooms, herbs, butter, salt, and yolks of two eggs. Lay it on a dish; cover with a layer of the stock, some crumbs over all, and bake, sprinkling some cheese over it, for 1/2 hour. Serve in the same dish.
Four related dishes from a single page: an English family stew of neck of mutton, and three Continental treatments of boiled beef tongue. All assume a cook who already knows how long a tongue takes and what a neck of mutton looks like.
- The half pint of water is not a typo, but it is not enoughThe half pint of water is not a typo, but it is very little -- a tightly covered pot over a slow fire held in far more liquid than a modern pan, and the meat and vegetables here are dished with the sauce strained over them rather than served as a soup. In a modern pan with a loose lid you will likely need enough liquid to just cover the meat and vegetables, topped up as the barley swells.
- Neck of mutton and the scragThe scrag is the thin bony top end of the neck, used whole here purely to enrich the broth and then removed. Mutton is rare in most markets; lamb neck or lamb shoulder chops on the bone work, though lamb is milder and will be tender sooner. The recipe gives no total time, only 'cook until the meat is tender'.
- Barley and the order of thingsTwo ounces of pearl barley is roughly a third of a cup and will roughly triple in volume. Adding it after the first half hour, as directed, keeps it from breaking down entirely into the sauce.
- Bran breadA coarse wholemeal loaf, not the sweetened bran muffin of later American baking. Any dense wholemeal or rye slice, toasted hard, serves the purpose, which is to soak up the strained sauce.
- Buying and boiling tongueFresh beef tongue is a 3 to 4 lb organ that needs 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer before it is tender enough to skin. Much of what is sold now is cured or pickled and will be markedly saltier; if you use it, soak it and do not salt the accompanying sauces until you have tasted them.
- Skin it while it is still warmThe recipes say to cool it first, but the tough outer skin peels away cleanly only while the tongue is hot enough to handle awkwardly. Once fully cold it clings and tears the meat. Skin warm, then press and chill if you want neat slices.
- Oven temperaturesNone of the three tongue dishes gives a heat. All are finishing dishes rather than roasts, so a moderate oven of about 350F should suit the Alsatian half hour of basting with port, the French crumbed and baked assembly, and the twenty minutes in the Italian version.
- A quart of chestnutsAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb in the shell, yielding perhaps a pound peeled. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute and remove the worst of the work. The puree should be stiff enough to hold the tongue on top, so add white stock cautiously.
- YieldThe hodge-podge feeds six generously. Each tongue dish serves six to eight as a main course, more if sliced thin.
Hodge-podge is the English cousin of the French hochepot, a name generally traced to the verb hocher, to shake or jostle, describing a pot of mixed things shaken together over the fire; the Scots kept the closely related hotch-potch, also built on neck of mutton and whatever roots the garden gave up. The neck was a cheap, bony, gelatinous cut that rewarded long slow cooking and fed a family from one joint, and the book calls it a very old family recipe rather than crediting anyone. The three tongue dishes that follow show the opposite instinct at work in the same section: a large cheap cut of offal treated as a centrepiece, egg-and-crumbed and basted with port in the Alsatian manner, gratinated with mushrooms in the Italian, or sliced and rebuilt around a forcemeat in the French, all of them elaborate handling applied to something a household could afford. Books of this sort took it for granted that a tongue was an ordinary thing to have in the pot.