Cooking a cow, month by month - Tongue

Learn how to cook Welsh chicken and leek pie

Ox’s tongue looks bad – grey and distended, like some death-bloated sea creature. It’s prickly on the surface and slimy at the throat end. But before it can be cooked, tongue must be soaked in brine.

You can use ‘table’ salt, though curing salt (potassium nitrate) is recommended. Leave the ox tongue soaking in the fridge in a dish with bay leaves and allspice berries.

After three days transfer to a large saucepan, cover it with water and bring to a boil. Skim off the grey scum as it rises to the surface. Simmer it for four hours at a very low temperature.

After cooking, strip off all the skin, trim off the nasty bits at the throat end, then curl it to fit into a dish. I want to make ox tongue pie and serve it, scowling, like a Victorian paterfamilias.

I suggest this to my wife, who points out that we’re having friends for dinner who might find this a bit weird – both the food and the mise-en-scene. ‘Can't you modify the pie to make it less ... tongue-y?’ she wonders. Actually, I can.

Jane Grigson's English Food contains a recipe for Welsh chicken and leek pie. It has ox tongue in it. No, I don't know why. Cooked tongue has the coarse, fibrous texture of good ham, and tastes like a gamier version of corned beef.

It works well in the pie, where it’s offset by the relative blandness of the chicken, and attracts favourable comments along the lines of: ‘I thought it would make me want to vomit, but it doesn’t.’ It’s revealing, though, that no one asks for the recipe.

HOW TO COOK IT Slice around 200g of tongue and arrange it on the bottom of a greased baking dish. Add 300g of cooked chicken and six chopped, blanched leeks. Fry an onion, add a tablespoon of flour and a small glass of white wine.

Then keep adding chicken stock until the sauce is gravy-like. Pour this onion sauce over the pie mixture. Cover with shortcrust pastry and bake for 20mins at 200C, then another 20mins at 180C until the pastry is golden brown.

John O’Connell Buy your meat at Boucherie Michel, First Floor, Jiezuo Building, Xingfucun Zhong Lu, Chaoyang district (6417 0489). Open 9am-8.30pm daily.

Buy your leeks, onions, pastry and wine at Jenny Lou’s, 6 Sanlitun Beixiaojie, Chaoyang district (6461 6928). Open 8am to 10pm daily.

John O'Connell