Lamb Tongues - from a 1651 recipe by François Pierre de La Varenne

When I used neat or beef tongue to make seventeenth century mince pies at Christmas, I was impressed and have been looking to use that meat, or similar, in other period recipes.  I was able to find some lamb tongues and there are a few different cookery books in the 1600s that give instructions for preparing mutton or sheep tongues.  Most are relatively simple but one had an interesting, quite savoury, sauce and, from a historical perspective, interesting accompaniments.  Not surprisingly, given the savoury nature of it, it comes from François Pierre de La Varenne, and can be found both in his ground-breaking Le Cuisinier françois (1651) and the English translation – The French Cook (1653).  

So, I present an adaption of La Varenne’s “Langue de mouton rosties,” translated as “Mutton tongues ro[a]sted.”  After the recipe, I will talk a bit about the departures I made, some of which were fairly significant, though I think I kept things in the spirit of the original.  One of the reasons I am interested in the cookery of this specific period is the changes that were taking place: there was a movement from medieval to early modern cookery.  Le Cuisinier françois is where we find several of those new elements in print.  To me at least, these instructions for cooking sheep’s tongues represents some of those cookery evolutions, and I will end this entry by briefing outlining what I mean.  

Lamb tongues broiled with bread sauce and mushrooms (from Langues de mouton roties) 

Serves 3 as a starter 

Ingredients  

For Stock  

• 3 (about 150g) of lamb tongues, well washed 
• 100g of mushrooms, cleaned  
• 2 green onions, bottom halves only, ends removed and chopped roughly 
• ½ tsp whole peppercorns 

For Sauce  

• 75g butter   
• 1 ¼ cup of lamb tongue stock from above, divided (More if sauce is too thick.)  
• 40g breadcrumbs  
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg  
• 1/4 tsp pepper 
• 1/8 tsp salt 
• 2 green onions, green top halves only, remaining from above, chopped fine. 
• 3 tbsp loosely packed parsley, leaves picked whole

For Broiling and Finishing   

• ¼ cup of stock from above 
• 25g of breadcrumbs 
• ¼ tsp salt 
• butter for frying 
• 100g of mushrooms, cleaned  
• 1 tbsp of capers, chopped if large 
• ½ a lemon cut into wedges  

Instructions 

Begin by cooking your tongues and thereby making a stock. Place your tongues, 100g of mushrooms, whole peppercorns, and the white halves of the green onions in a medium pan.  

Add enough water to cover by an inch.  Bring to a low boil and cook for 2 and ½ hours, adding more water as needed to make sure tongues remain covered.   

Remove tongues to cool. When cool, it should be easy to peel away the top a layer of tough skin. When peeled, set aside. 

Pass stock through a fine mesh strainer into a large bowl.  Set aside stock and discard remaining solids.  You will probably have more stock than is used in this recipe, reserve it for any other use.  

Begin making your sauce by melting your 75g of butter in a saucepan over medium high heat.   

When melted, add ½ cup of the stock and allow to boil and reduce for about 3 minutes. 

Add your salt, pepper, and nutmeg. 

Add your 40g of breadcrumbs, which will instantly thicken the sauce. 

Add the remaining ¾ cup of stock, a little at a time to keep it loose and pourable. 

Add the chopped green onion tops and parsley. 

Reduce heat to low to keep the sauce warm but do not thicken it beyond pourable. 

Prepare a baking sheet lined with tin foil and set your oven to a medium broil. (If your oven does not have a variable broil, place your tongues on the lowest rack in the coming step.)  Alternatively, you could grill your tongue on a medium barbeque or grill pan for 1 minute on each side. 

Place remaining 25g of breadcrumbs on a plate. 

Add ¼ tsp salt to these and mix together. 

Put ¼ cup of the stock in a small bowl.  

Slice your lamb tongues in half, lengthwise.  

Dip your tongue halves one at a time in the stock and then in the salted breadcrumbs.  Place on the foiled baking sheet cut side up. 

Place breaded tongues in the oven on the top rack and watch closely for 2 minutes.  The breadcrumbs should be brown and the tongues themselves just taking on a little colour. Turn over and repeat. 

When crisp on both sides, remove tongues and place in the sauce on the stove. Turn up heat to medium low. 

While they are simmering, in a small fry pan, melt some butter and fry the remaining 100g of mushrooms until golden. 

Remove your tongue halves to a cutting board.   

Check your sauce for seasoning and add more stock if too thick. Pour onto a serving plate.   

Place tongues on top of the sauce, making sure to keep one side crispy.  Add fried mushrooms, scatter the capers over and serve with lemon wedges.  

Notes on Adaptation 

There was a combination of guesswork, experience and inexpert translation that went into this adaption.   

A 1673 third edition of  The French Cook 
translation I had a chance to photograph

Neither La Varenne nor the English translator give much in terms of quantities once again, so I worked from experience, measuring as I went. 

I used lamb tongues not mutton or sheep but possibly the most significant departure I took from the French author’s recipe was the initial preparation of those tongues.   Almost every modern recipe and several period ones boil then peel the tongues before cooking them in any other way.  La Varenne begins by saying to “Habillez” them, which is translated correctly as “dress” in The French Cook.  I am not sure whether that might be shorthand for the usual cooking method. 

That aside, I took a few more liberties when I did boil them. The additions of mushrooms, peppercorns and the whites of green onions were my own, but those ingredients were used elsewhere in the dish, so reenforced the flavour profile.  It also produced a very nice broth, which the actual recipe does call for later.  

Once you “dress” and halve the tongues, the next step in English is to “bestrew” them. This is not quite the same as what the French original says: the word it uses is – “arrosez.” This means “to water” as in “water your plants” or maybe in this context – “to baste.”  The purpose for doing this in both versions is so that the coming breadcrumbs and salt will stick or hold to the tongues.  I had made some very nice stock and had plenty, so I used that.   

Once so dredged, I broiled my tongue as it is very much winter and I, therefore, have no access to a grill.  Grilling would be closer to the original recipe.  

In the sauce, the French recipe calls for “siboulles” (spelled modernly “ciboulles”) and the English one renders that as “chibols” (modernly “cibols”) which comes from the same root.  Both words mean a plant called a Welsh onion, which is similar to green onions.  The English text also calls for “chippings,” which is slightly vague, but the French is “chappelure” – clearly breadcrumbs.  

Getting the sauce to a decent thickness was a bit of experimentation but I liked the result in the end, so I give you the different steps I took.   

Once finished making the sauce and grilling the tongues, The French Cook says to “stove” the tongues with the sauce, while La Varenne says to “mittoner” – simmer – them.  I did this while cooking the garnishing mushrooms.     

It is winter, so I did use those garnishes as the recipe recommends and overall, I really liked this dish.  The tongues have the slightest lamb flavour as compared to beef tongues, which adds an interesting layer.  What is essentially a bread sauce is made savoury by the great stock, the butter, and the onions. The nutmeg adds background warmth like it can in something like a Bolognese sauce.  Capers and lemon juice provide a brightness that cuts through the rich sauce and meatiness.  It is kind of strange to dredge something in breadcrumbs and then add it to a sauce but if you are careful, you can keep the top crispy, which gives some textural variation.   

Historical Importance of These Lamb Tongues 

This is a savoury dish, there is nothing sweet added and the spicing is kept basic and subtle.  The recorded cookery across Medieval Europe generally used a lot of spice and sugar, often, in my opinion, not for the taste but as a demonstration of conspicuous consumption.  Most spices and sugar were imported and expensive; cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and similar fill so many of the dishes. It was upper class cookery instructions that were written down and survive; therefore, the motives for preparing foods went well beyond making the food taste good.   

In the seventeenth century, that began to change slowly, first, and especially, in France as demonstrated by Le Cuisinier françois.  The idea was to make foods taste like themselves, not a sugar-spice mix that showed how rich you were. Cooks began, therefore, to pick accompaniments that highlighted the main ingredient; more fresh herbs were used along with salt and pepper.  These tongues are a step in that direction, the nutmeg can be used subtly to highlight the savouriness of the meat and the other ingredients provide a modern taste profile.  I will return to La Varenne to explore these evolutions in future entries, I am sure.     

A page from the above copy of The
French Cook showing multiple owners 
and/or readers. 

Hand-minced, Hand-stuffed 17th-Century Sausages

Sausages boil and fried served with 17th century available 
buttered spinach and turnips with nutmeg. 

As the saying goes, we got there in the end. This week's entry details my attempt to use some pork shoulder I had to make a couple different sausages. Making sausages seemed to be one of the main uses of that specific meat in the seventeenth century, if the extant cookery books provide an accurate picture. Robert May’s The Accomplist Cook (1660) is a pretty encyclopedic source for most things culinary at the time and this proved true in finding guidelines for this endeavour. I also found a different recipe from an earlier anonymous book called The Good Hous-wives Treasurie (1588). 

Probably pretty foolishly, I decided to try and make these sausages by hand, both in the dicing and the stuffing. I did to try to come close to period methods and tools. It is a very long and tedious process, exacerbated by the fact that despite me buying modern collagen ones, I broke my casings a lot. Whether you want to follow them or not, I will give you a couple recipes based on my process. I present those first, then explain my adaptions of the historical original recipes and finally give a few historical insights on Bolonia sausages that I found in my reading. 

Recipes 

“Sausages of Pork” (based on a recipe from The Accomplist Cook) 

Ingredients: 

• 600g boneless pork shoulder, minced as fine as you can 
• 40g beef suet, shredded 
• 6g fresh sage leaves, minced 
• 1 tsp salt 
• ½ tsp pepper, coarsely ground 
• ½ tsp cloves, ground 
• ¼ tsp mace, ground 
• Sausage casings for stuffing 
• Butter for frying 

Instructions: 

Take all ingredients save the casings and butter. Mix together well in a large bowl. 

Refrigerate the bowl and take out a small amount of the meat mixture to work with, as you will be hand-stuffing your sausage for a while. 

Prepare your casings, if needed, as per instructions. Collagen ones say they do not need preparation, but I found that massaging them a bit with greasy hands at the opening helps loosen it up a bit. Cut off the amount you are going to use; tie one end off and open the other. 

Take a decent-sized spoon with a short wide handle – a large measuring spoon will work or an Asian soup spoon. Stick the handle end into the open end of your casing, leaving the spoon part sticking out. 

Grab the handle (and the casing opening) with one hand. With the other, place a small amount of sausage meat in the spoon and carefully push it into the casing opening. 

Push that first bit of meat all the way down to the tied-off end of your casing. This will prepare the casing for the rest. 

Repeat, again and again and again etc. until you fill your sausage. 

Push out as much air as you can. 

Tie off the other end. If you didn’t leave yourself enough casing, twist what you have and tie a knot around it with kitchen string. 

Poke your completed sausage with a sharp knife or a few times with a pin. 

Boil very gently for about 15 minutes or fry in butter on medium heat until golden on all side – about 10 minutes. 

Serve. 

“To Make Sausages” (based on a recipe from The Good Hous-wives Treasurie) 

Ingredients: 

• 400g pork shoulder, minced 
• 50g beef suet, shredded 
• 2 egg yolks 
• 100g bread crumbs 
• 2 Tbsp whipping cream 
• 1 tsp salt 
• 1 tsp pepper, coarsely ground 
• Flour for dusting 
• Butter for frying 

Instructions: 

Mix all ingredients save the flour and butter in a large bowl. 

Form into patties or sausage shapes. 

Dust shapes with flour. 

Fry in butter on medium heat turning until all sides are deeply coloured – about 10 minutes. 

Serve. 

Notes on Adaption and Historical Texts 

I will say again: mincing pork shoulder and stuffing casings by hand is a whole lot of work but I did learn a skill that has no practical modern use. Also, despite all your efforts and blisters on your knife hand, you will not get uniform minced pork. The result, however, is really very tasty, certainly different from your regular ground sausage. More on the specific tastes after each version. 

Robert May gives instructions for Bolonia Sausages (which I will touch on a bit later), four other sausage variations and “Links.” 

The ingredient list for my first attempt comes from one of the pork variations from above. The writer says to roll those into sausage shapes and fry them. In another he says: “fill them into porkets guts, or hogs, or sheeps guts, or no guts.” For the experience, apparently, I decided to stuff most of this sausage meat into casings. In other variants, he says “if in guts, boil them” and “if without guts, fry them.” I tried both and, probably not surprisingly, the texture of the fried ones were better but the boiled ones were not bad and had a great flavour. 

May gives no quantities, so again I went with experience, measuring as I went. Modern pork shoulder as opposed to the leg - which some recipes specify - is quite fatty, so I kept the amount of suet low in this one. 

These sausages are very sage-forward with the ingredient ratios I used. I really like the herb and, as many period recipes already figured out, it goes great with pork. That said, if sage is not your thing, you will probably want to cut back on it a little. The cloves and mace are nice background or secondary flavours. The meatiness that suet provides other dishes is not needed here and it is probably lost overall. 

Hannah Woolley also provides a similar sage pork sausage recipe in The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight (1675). You can compare it below. 

As I could not find a digital image of The Good Hous-wives Treasurie (1588), I include the transcription of the second recipe I adapted, with some of the spelling modernised. 

“How to make Sausages. 

Take the Fillets of a Hog, and half as much of the suet of the Hog: and chop them both very small, then take grated bread, two or three yolks of eggs a spoonful of gross pepper, as much salt, temper them with a little cream, and so put them into the skin and broil them on a gridiron.” 

Again, the pork shoulder I was using had a lot of fat, so I did not use near “half as much” suet as meat. I also had beef suet already, so I used it. For the same reason, I used fine bread crumbs rather than grated bread. This along with the egg yolks and cream made the mix quite solid. I did try to stuff casings with it as the recipes says but it was impossible to push it through without breaking them. So, I cheated and used May’s advice and just made patties and formed some sausages. I got the flour from another recipe for sausages without casings and it helped to keep the sausages together in the pan. I also fried not broiled them. 

These sausage attempts came out extremely crispy and nice, though not really like sausages. I missed the flavours of the sage and spices in my other version but seasoned, almost crunchy pork is not bad at all. 

A Final Word on Bolonia Sausages (or maybe a project for another day) 

I am a big fan of mortadella, sliced super thin. It is the superior predecessor of the bologna or baloney known to North American kids. In Italy, mortadella was probably around in the fourteenth century and by the seventeenth, lots of English cookery texts mention Bolonia sausages. Robert May gives them a prominent place in his section on the meaty preparations. 

Like today’s mortadella, he calls for small chunks of lard in the minced meat. Another text from 1699 gives instructions “To make Sausages equal to those brought from Bolonia” and claims at the end “they will equal those so much boasted of from Italy.” Bolonia sausage is something that I would like to try but there are some barriers as seen in May's recipe above. 

I will need to find “beefer guts” as well as “peter-salt” (I assume saltpeter) or the so far unknown “Spanish salt.” It also requires curing and/or smoking time and locations and thus remains a medium-term dream. 

Potatoes Baked (but not as you know them) from Robert May 1660.

This week we return to something (sort of) savoury and the friendly English confines of Robert May’s extensive work, The Accomplisht Cook. The base for this entry's recipe is the humble potato – though a little less so in this, the seventeenth, century because it was relatively new to England. Sir Walter Raleigh may have first brought them to the island on his return from Virginia in 1586. It was not yet a staple in the middle of the next century when cookery books like The Accomplisht Cook were being written though they are not a complete rarity in the upper-class recipes those texts contain. 

“The Table” or index of May’s book lists the recipe as “Potatoes baked”. Again, it is not quite as humble or savoury as what that phrase would conjure up in a modern context. The full title of the instructions is “To bake Potatoes, Artichocks, in Dish, Pye, or Patty-pan, either in Paste, or little Pasties, according to these forms.” I will again give a modern adaption first, then some explanation of my choices and some of the historical and culinary context.

Potatoes Baked (a Potato Pie) Recipe

Ingredients

Pie

• 800g small to medium potatoes, scrubbed
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp pepper
• ¼ tsp nutmeg
• ¼ tsp cinnamon
• Approximately 400g pastry/dough - enough for a full 10-inch pie, top and bottom. See Notes.
• 50g butter, divided plus some for greasing.
• 60g dates, halved
• 50g beef marrow or suet, cut small or shredded
• 1/8 tsp mace
• 1 lemon, well scrubbed

Liquor or lear

• 50g of butter
• 1 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 2 tsp sugar

To Finish

• A small handful of sugar

Instructions

Bring a large pot of water to a boil.

Add potatoes and cook until tender but not falling apart: about 15 minutes for small potatoes, 20 minutes for medium.

Drain potatoes and place on a cutting board or similar, to cool slightly.

Turn on your oven at this point and preheat to 400°F / 205°C.

In the meantime, combine salt, pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon in a small bowl. Set aside.

Grease a 10-inch pie pan with a little butter. Roll out enough pastry to line the bottom of the pan. Roll up onto a rolling pin and roll onto pan. Push pastry into pan.

Cut up 25g of your butter and scatter over the bottom of your pastry in the pan.

When potatoes have cooled enough, peel and place them on top of the butter.

Scatter over the salt and seasonings you have mixed in the bowl.

Place your date halves around the potatoes.

Scatter marrow pieces or suet equally over potatoes.

Do the same with the mace and 25g more of butter pieces.

On a clean cutting board, cut your lemon into round slices, discarding the pithy ends. Working over a small bowl – the one you mixed the spices in will work – pick out the seeds with the tip of your knife. Place the slices on top of the potatoes. Pour any juice from the bowl and cutting board over the filling as well.

Roll out the rest of your pastry. Roll onto your rolling pin and roll over the top of the filled pie. Crimp around the edge to seal.

Cut a small circle of pastry out of the centre of the top crust and replace, this will act as your vent or funnel.

If you have pastry remaining, you may decorate the top with whatever “fancies” you desire. See Notes.

Place your pie in the middle of the oven and bake for 400°F / 205°C for 15 minutes.

While the pie begins to bake, make your liquor. Melt the remaining 50 g of butter in a small pan, remove from heat and add your white wine vinegar and sugar. Set aside. 

Turn your oven down to 375°F / 175°C and bake your pie for a further 10 minutes.

Scatter your small handful of sugar over the top of the pie and return to the oven.

Cook for 5 minutes more or until the crust is golden.

Remove the circle of pastry you cut in the top of the crust earlier and pour in your butter/vinegar liquor and then replace circle.

Serve.

Notes on adaptation and in review

I had a pie pan's worth of frozen pastry leftover from my venison pasty attempt and extra puff pastry from my cream-tart last week. I used those for my pie shell and top respectively. Use whatever combination of ready-made pastry or period or modern recipes that will get you about 400g worth. My recipe from the pasty will work but it will make much more than needed.

Robert May’s instructions for these baked potatoes called for rosewater scattered with the sugar at end and “eringo-roots" to be added to the potatoes in the pie. I still did not have rosewater, unfortunately. Eringo known as eryngo or sea holly today, is a plant used as an herbal remedy or tea; its roots were candied in period cooking and this is probably what May is referring to. I have yet to access it but I see there are seeds available, so maybe this summer. I also did not have verjuice, so I used a relatively small amount of vinegar and I also replaced the beef marrow in the recipe with beef suet, because I had the latter on hand.

The period recipe gives no quantities, so I again judged amounts visually, recording the weights and measures as I went.

“Blanch” in period culinary contexts refers most often to almonds, where they are boiled then skinned. So, when May says the potatoes “being tender boild, blanch them,” I took that to mean he was saying peel them at that stage.

May gives specific forms for this dish in the first (1660) edition of The Accomplisht Cook, as seen in the image above. He or his publishers provide different forms in a fold-out section of later editions. Below you can see the versions from the 1678 and 1685 editions, which I had a chance to photograph.

I carved one of these into my pie top but it got lost in the baking, so he probably added the forms with pastry, called by other authors “fancies.” It probably also identified what was in the pie for the diner.

I sprinkled the sugar 5 minutes before the end of baking. May does not say to do this explicitly but does in similar dishes, as do other authors.

As you can guess, this dish is a lot of starch – potatoes in pastry - and an interesting mix of sweet, savoury and sour. Interesting in a good way but a ways off of the normal use of potatoes, in Western cuisine at least. The dates and a little sugar provide hits of sweet, while the lemon and vinegar counter-balance that with some sour. Potatoes cooked in suet is a nice savoury background. I could probably have added more but with the amount of butter added, and in the pastry, I was worried about the dish overall getting too greasy. As it was, the potatoes seemed to soak up a lot and still had a good texture. May does not say to cut up the potatoes and I did not. Other writers like William Rabisha in The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661) and Thomas Cooper in The Art of Cookery Refin'd and Augmented (1654) slice the main ingredient after boiling in their recipes for potato pies. This may have been a bit easier to eat and the flavours may have penetrated better throughout. Overall, if you can take something like chip butty (a sandwich of fries and condiments), this starch on starch with layers of different flavours is excellent comfort food.

Next week, the plan is to try to make some period sausages.