Tuesday 15 December 2009

Tongue

I remember my mother preparing beef tongue when I was a child, simmering for hours, then skinning and pressing, before it was cut into neat slices for salads or sandwiches. I remember liking both taste and texture.

Fresh beef tongue is widely available in France and not all that expensive per kilo. I fancied buying a tongue to provide a bit of a change on the lunchtime platter. But beef tongues are enormous - 4 or 5 kilos of solid meat. You can buy half tongues, but they still put a serious hole in the weekly food budget, coming in at about 10€.

In the end I decided we would go for something smaller (and even cheaper per kilo if you buy it and cook yourself). Pork tongues are just as widely available, and lamb tongues are sometimes too.

I bought a packet of cooked pork tongue in aspic, to see if we liked it. So far as I can tell, comparing the pork tongue to my far away memories of beef tongue, they are very similar, and I will definitely be buying the occasional fresh pig's tongue to slow cook myself.

Susan

4 comments:

Schnitzel and the Trout said...

I grew up eating boiled beef tongue topped with cooked horseradish sauce. Loved it. Don't see it much in the USA, but I doubt if anyone in the house would be eating it besides me..hmmmm

Anne in Oxfordshire said...

I worked on the deli in Sainsburys, and that is one thing I hated slicing on the machine...and if you didn't have any tongue there was an uproar..and this was 2 years ago.

Ken Broadhurst said...

People say "no tongue" because they don't want to taste anything that can taste them back! I quite like tongue, though, in a pot au feu for example. That would be beef tongue. I've never tasted pork or lamb's tongue.

Word verification string is sativati. Something to do with salivating?

Jean said...

Oh dear - nightmares are made of this - memories of cold pressed tongue in limp salad sandwiches in the 1950's come lurching back. Followed by bananas in custard and a lukewarm cup of tea with tealeaves in the bottom of the cup. Yuk.
I would take a lot of convincing about this I'm afraid.

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