FoodTwit

My father was an Iowa native, child of a meat and potatoes culture more or less untouched by the canned-soup-casserole revolution, and set many of our food expectations. Vegetables were considered suspicious but necessary elements of the meal, and to be rendered safe by vigorous and long cooking. Meat was a gift to the table, and cooked with care. More importantly, somewhere along the line he’d tripped over the holy trinity of James Beard, Craig Claiborn and Julia Child, and had converted to francophilia. Perhaps it was in college, hotbed of all radical thought. I can imagine him flambéing crepes while others were setting fire to the ROTC building.

More likely it happened later, considering he moved from dorm room directly into domestication and the grand cuisine is ill-suited to the hotplate. The feminist movement was in full swing when my sister and I were born, and my parents committed to a full partnership in all domestic duties including cooking. My mother had six dishes she begrudgingly made; my father had 16 cookbooks he cooked from. Thus if Monday was three bean casserole, then Tuesday was lamb shank with flageolet. If Wednesday was Pillsbury roll pizza, then Thursday could be roasted chicken, if Friday was tacos then Saturday… well sometimes Saturday was tongue.

My sister and I both admit to fighting over the tip. We considered it a treat, though honestly I can’t remember why. Was it more tender, more mild, or merely smaller (a quality loved by children everywhere.) We both enjoy seeing our friends squirm when we tell this story. We grew up surrounded by farms, although my parents were lawyers. Sheep and cows were less common than pigs, but they all were common sights and easily within a petting hand if one was inclined to pet dinner. She is now a vegetarian. I’ve gone the other way, eating sweetbreads, andouillette (the sometimes noxious tripe sausage), chicken liver salads and oxtail stew. My sister is eating what the dinner is eating. I’m working toward hoof to snout eating. But oddly I hadn’t eaten tongue since childhood, and had never cooked it.

I only realized that omission when a growing repulsion with feedlot beef brought me to visit the Pomparo Ranch stand at the farmer’s market. The whiteboard listed a number of crossed-out items including strip steaks and filets, but my father’s choice was still available.

“Tongue, please.”

“Well all right!” the stand manager said. “I hear it’s good.” Bad sign, I wondered?

I paid about 20 bucks for just under three pounds. It wasn’t the stunning bargain I expected for the part of the animal usually used to promote cannibalism in cows, but it was heavy and weirdly intimate in my hand, and that distracted me as I reached for my wallet. Plus I could almost feel my dad standing behind me, beaming with pride.

Monday I came home from work a little early, knowing it was waiting for me. But first I futzed around a bit, putting away some of my daughter’s clothes that didn’t fit anymore, answering some email. Not that I was intimidated; I just didn’t feel it was necessary to rush into anything. Unfortunately I was wrong about that. I finally started digging up recipes and got the bad news. Many suggested an overnight soak in water, with a 2-3 changes for fresh water. All suggested a 2 ½ to 5 hour boiling time, except one that said I could boil it for 15 minutes, peel, and then braise for an hour. This gave me courage to at least set water on the stove. I left the computer to go to the cookbook shelf. Jacque Pepin was no help; not really his audience’s thing I suppose. Tongue doesn’t qualify as Fast Food anyone’s way. McGee’s Mr. Science approach revealed only that there was more fat and iron in tongue than normal beef cuts and wisely moved on to Foie Gras without a backwards glance. Anthony Bourdain had a tongue in Madeira recipe, but do you really want to rely on a guy who makes his living eating frogs and bugs on TV?

I figured I had to move back in time to when people ate more of the animal. Francophile cookbook author Paula Wolfert had a pickled tongue recipe; Julia Child had advice on calf brain, but not tongue. I regretted for the first time not having Joy of Cooking; I’m sure every fifties housewife knows what to do with tongue. It was time to stop messing around, and open up my Larousse and Escoffier. Each of these books weighs twice as much as the tongue and are printed with 6 point type; they hold encyclopedic amounts of information about how to cook everything slower than you. Neither let me down.

Mind you, Escoffier isn’t there to hold your hand. Recipe 1153 reads “Beef or ox tongue is served fresh or salted, but, even when it is to be served fresh, it is all the better for having been put in salt a few days previously. In order to salt it, put it in a special brine as explained under (172). When salted, it is cooked in boiling water; when fresh it is braised exactly after the manner of any other piece of meat.” And if you don’t know what that is, get out of my kitchen you silly person. I fart in your general direction.

He listed no cooking times, no weights, he didn’t even mention the peeling that every other recipe made abundantly clear was required. He managed to cross reference three other recipes, all of equal brevity and mystery. I sat with my fingers bookmarking multiple spots, flipping back and forth between them and the index, decoding.

After Escoffier, my Larousse Gastronomique felt positively chatty. After explaining that tongues are “the fleshy organs from the heads of slaughtered livestock” and that “Pink flamingo tongues were considered to be a delicacy in ancient Rome,” he moved swiftly to the master recipe: 12 hours of soaking with three water changes. Then a quick blanching, peel it, salt it and rest in a cool place for 24 hours. And then you could actually begin to cook it; either boiling for 2 ½ hours, braising for 2 ½ hours, or a l’italianne (which is braising with tomatoes thrown in at the end). My tongue was already in boiling water with bay leaves, and had been for 45 minutes. I was past the salting and water changing phases. I switched books again, still seeking hope I’d be eating before midnight.

Escoffier suggested such suitable approaches as Tongue Bourgeoise, Flamande, and Milanaise, but he led with Madeira sauce. It seemed the insectivore might be on to something. I reopened Bourdain’s Les Halles coobook. Boil for 1 hour 15 minutes (I was almost there at this point), then braise in a mixture of onions, leeks, carrots, Madeira and stock, with a bouquet garni.

I had an onion and a leek, but no carrot. I stole one of my daughter’s snack boxes, and split the contents between the pot and her bowl. I then put on a DVD, so I could be left alone to remove the steaming beast from the boiling pot. Tongue is an oddly shaped bit of meat, and it took several attempts with the tongs to wrest it to the sink. I then ran cold water over it until I could handle it enough to peel it. It was stiff, and the tip felt remarkably like a cats tongue. I pictured a calf licking my fingers briefly, then decided I was just seeing if I could gross myself out, and moved on to the peeling problem.

I tried entering under the skin at several places, digging with my sharp little paring knife, but finding very little traction. A Canadian site had insisted that boiling for five hours would loosen the skin so that it would slip off. One hour hadn’t done the job I thought, until I moved close to the tip where the skin did pull off easily. I ended up just slicing the skin off at the base, guessing where the skin ended and the meat began. The smell was intensely familiar. It was little like French tripe sausage without the scary notes that are always reminding you for the origin of the stuffing. It smelled a little like hot boiled turkey hearts mom cooked for the gravy on thanksgiving. But mostly it smelled a lot like being ten years old and putting your nose into a steamy piece of tongue. It was unquestionably offal, but it was not offensive.

Still, no time for proustian reminiscence. Not if I wanted to eat. I was anxious this process was taking too long; the clock read 7 and theoretically I had two or more hours to go. I threw the onions in with olive oil, and went back to peeling. I caught the scent of burning onions seconds before the point of no return, and added carrots and reached for what I had thought was madeira. It was marsala. I decided it was no time for semantics, and threw in a cup of it, followed by splash of crème sherry for luck. Bouquet garni’s always sruck me as excessive fussing if you planned to strain the sauce (and to be honest, often when you aren’t.) I threw in several sprigs of thyme, then several more, then a couple more. I put in the called for cup of stock, then the denuded tongue. He looked naked and forlorn, and I poured the rest of the stock in. I was settling into a combo boil/braise method. I covered the pan as my husband walked in.

We walked to the back porch and collapsed on the deck chairs. “I have a confession.”

I admitted to him that a) there was tongue on the stove and b) I may have miscalculated how long it would take. But there are moments when marrying a French man is a great blessing and this is one of them. Neither eating cow parts nor eating them at ten or later caused him to blink. All he said is “they are hard to peel.” He then told me of his time in the army.

In France, everyone has to serve compulsory time in the military. Somehow my husband Philippe managed to get cooking duty for most of his year. His first assignment was tongue for 25 people (my estimate is 7-8 tongues.) Then the chef was called away. The chef gave Philippe brief, Escoffier-like instructions and disappeared, leaving him to wrestle with connective tissue alone, boil for hours alone, faced 25 hungry 18-year-old soldiers alone. I knew at that moment I could not disappoint my man. He was sympathetique.

Philippe went in to play with my daughter and her dollhouse, I glanced at the clock and went for a bike ride. The tongue boiled.

I arrived home at sun set. I looked in the pot, the tongue looked the same. I yelled at Philippe “How do you know when it’s tender?” “You taste it.” I gave the tongue a couple of exploratory squeezes with the tongs and for the umpteenth time ignore all advice before me. I took it out to ‘rest’, and finished the sauce by straining and reducing. I then sliced the tongue not as thinly as I think Bourdain would have, added twice as much butter to the sauce as called for (as I think Julia would have), arranged the oddly shaped slices on the platter. At the last moment, I carved the tip into two as my father had done so many times so my sister and I wouldn’t fight. I leaned over the tongue and inhaled that warm and welcoming smell. I want to compare it to mother’s hugs, or to curling up to your warm lover’s chest before falling asleep, but really it smelled like tongue. Mild, beefy, familiar and different. Now that I could see the finish line, I could pause with my nose above the platter of sauced meat, picking out the thyme and the butter, the vinegar and the Marsala. I could close my eyes and almost smell the old cookbooks that accompanied my father’s kitchen efforts. And then I served it.

I really want to tell you what it like. But I’m not certain how to, beyond the fact that it was exactly like I remembered, except I hadn’t remembered what it was like until I ate it. Chewey, but not gristly. Resilient. Mildly beefy and earthy, like the smell. Homey. Stewy.

Philippe said, in order.

“It’s good.”

“I think it could cook for a couple more hours.”

“It’s good.”

And then he started eating the sauce with a spoon.

Our daughter had eaten pasta with butter and an avocado three hours earlier, and did not weigh in.