To serve four.

I’d like to apologize for not updating until today. This weekend was a whirlwind of activity, with long drives and the ever important maintenance of my neglected lawn. To make amends I will update twice this week.

With this post, I will have finished off all of the ox tongue recipes. It has been a real joy working with this maligned piece of meat because it’s just so darn tender and tasty. Every dish–minus the beet one–is something I’d happily make again, and that includes this weeks simple salad recipe. If you’d like to give it a go yourself, Mr. Henderson has posted the recipe here.

The recipe starts off asking for sixteen cubes of crustless day old white bread. The bread hadn’t gotten terribly stale when I was cutting it, but it wasn’t exactly light and yielding, either.

I dropped the bread cubes into a bowl with a heavy dollop of green sauce, mixing the two before setting the bowl aside and giving them time to get acquainted.

Before making this salad I had never used, nor knowingly eaten sorrel. The leaves had a very nice acidic zing with very pleasant light lemon notes. This was another one of those culinary “ah ha!” moments for me.

The very last bits of the brined ox tongue. I carefully sliced the remaining hunk of tongue, trying to keep a uniform thickness. You can see spots of iridescence
on the slices here and there, which intrigued me: Why do some cuts have that rainbow-like effect while others don’t? A quick Google search supplied the answer.

The iridescence (“rainbow-like sheen”) of certain cuts of meat is due to the regular muscle fiber structure of the meat combined with water droplets to create a “diffraction grating”. The reflection of light off the water in the regular fiber grating causes separation of colors much like what happens with a prism. In the meat industry, it is known that the effect is enhanced when phosphates (read: salt) are used to increase the amount of water held in the meat. A dry meat surface scatters rather than diffracts or reflects light. The iridescence is also not an indication of spoilage.

The sorrel leaves, the tongue slices, a few trimmed scallions and a big bunch of watercress were all mixed with the bread cubes and green sauce. On top of that, a healthy splash of extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice was added to loosen things up. Borage leaves were an optional ingredient, and despite my best efforts I was unable to find them. To remedy that, I have picked up some Borage seeds and come this spring I’ll have to try this recipe again with them.

The final dish. I’m a big fan of bright, acidic dishes and this salad–with all of its components working together harmoniously–totally fits the bill. The tongue again plays the rich, tender meat part very well, while the wonderfully schizophrenic green sauce balances things out. Out of all of the ox tongue recipes, this one is far and away my favorite.

Here’s a quick peek at the next update:

One down, one hundred and twenty to go.