As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
For some reason I was moved to look up about pickled buffalo tongues and instead I was perplexed as I know more about them than the posts online. This gem was ludicrous in what this woman wrote on some poetry site.
Buffalo tongues were pickled in salt, freightcars of them, & shipped east in a rhythmic industrial music of the mind, millions of tongues passing over our horizontal sleepers, clackety-clack.
I don't know whether they were packed in wooden crates or barrels, or if merchants supplied the hunters & shippers with stoneware vats, the 20 & 50 & 100 galloners that still show up at country auctions. It must have been very dark & very silent inside a vat of tongues.
But I'm wondering, to begin with, how hard it was to cut the tongue out. How rigid were the jaws of the dead animal? Could a right-handed hunter hold down the lower jaw with his right knee while inserting the fingers of his left hand in the nostrils & pulling the jaws? In this way his right hand would be free to work a knife. But he'd need two hands to cut out the wet tongue, wouldn't he? Maybe it had to be a two-man operation.
They did not have to break out teeth to get to that organ, I'd guess, but how far back did they make their cut? Did they try to get as much root as possible, maybe a little palate, & was the root a darker or fattier meat that chefs were glad to receive?
It must have been arm-wearying work to collect hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of tongues. Were they thrown into salt or a brine solution right away, or put in leather or canvas bags, or Indian baskets, or were they thrown on a wagn? How much did noe weigh? I've read that in the buffalo killers' camps conditions were such that skinning knives also "did duty at the platter," but just how big & what shape was the tongue-knife? …
Then of course there is the pickled tongue recipe, but I am certain that the runners and skinners were not cooking up 30 tongues a day in pickling spices.
- 1 beef tongue
- 3 cups vinegar
- 4 cups water
- 1 cup sugar (to taste)
- 2 large onions, sliced
- 1 teaspoon pickling spices
- 1 teaspoon mustard seeds
- 1 bay leaf
- 6 garlic cloves
Directions
- Boil tongue in salt water for 3 hours. Peel skin from the tongue.
- Mix remaining ingredients in a large, nonreactive pot and bring to a boil.
- Add meat and boil for 10 minutes.
- Cool and store in refridgerator for one week.
- Slice tongue thinly to serve.
OK according to President Theodore Roosevelt, here is the reality.
One does not cut the tongue out through the mouth, but one slits the throat and pulls it out from that juncture. It is beyond the pale in someone post about breaking a jaw to get at the tongue.
As for pickling, to pickle meant salting not spicing. It is the same as the English in corning. As I found no records if spices were added or it was like pickled eggs at the bar in saline solution, it is one of the mysteries of that era.
I do know that Teddy Roosevelt did smoke tongue as well as other meat to cure it. That would be a wonderful delicacy.
One thing in the tongue, when you boil it, plunge it into cold water to get the nasty skin to slide off. If that white membrane is too repulsive with taste bud bumps, then slice it off.
Tongue was a delicacy among White Americans. It is one of the best cuts of meat, especially in sandwiches. I will assume the tongues were packed in salt in 50 gallon wooden barrels on the plains. The salt would wick the moisture out to produce a brine, with the tongue skin still on. What the merchants did in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York is a guess, but I would conclude they would have been boiled to rid the tongue of the skin and salt, like a Virginia ham or Norwegians with salt cod.
I doubt pickling spices were used. It would have been a slab of meat cut off, slab of cheese, a big dill pickle and a beer, topped off with a pickled egg.
Always the way it is, in I usually know more in passing than the always experts posting idiotry on subjects.
Thank You Lord.
agtG
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