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The cut: tongue
The dish: Welsh chicken and leek pie

You can’t underestimate the shock value of an ox’s tongue. It looks bad enough – grey and distended, like some death-bloated sea creature. But it’s how it feels that stays with you. It’s prickly on the surface, slimy at the throat end. If ever you wanted proof that the animal you’re eating was once hulkingly, ravenously alive, the tongue is surely it.

Before it can be cooked, tongue must be soaked in brine. You can make brine using ordinary ‘table’ salt (sodium chloride), but Ginger Pig’s master butcher Borut recommends curing salt (aka potassium nitrate, E252 or saltpetre). It will turn the tongue a pleasing red colour as the naturally occurring bacteria convert potassium nitrate into potassium nitrite.

I leave the ox tongue soaking in the fridge in a glass casserole dish. (As instructed by Borut the butcher, I’ve added bay leaves and allspice berries.) Later that evening, I’m upstairs putting my daughter, Scarlett, to bed when I hear the front door open. It’s my wife. I’m halfway through ‘Goodbye Mog’ when there’s a blood-curdling scream.

‘What was that?’ asks Scarlett.
‘It was mummy finding an ox’s tongue in the fridge.’
‘Oh. Can I see the ox’s tongue?’
‘Not right now.’
‘Does the ox’s tongue talk?’
‘Um, no.’
Feature continues

Three days later, Scarlett watches as I transfer the tongue to a large saucepan, cover it with water and bring it to the boil. Then she helps me skim off the grey scum as it rises to the surface. ‘It looks like a fish,’ she says.

Tongue should be simmered for four hours at a very low temperature. Most people eat it cold. After cooking, you strip off all the skin – it comes away easily. You trim off the nasty bits at the throat end, then curl it to fit into a round tin or dish. You mix gelatine with some of the stock and maybe a little port, pour it over the tongue, then weigh it down with an old iron (my mother’s suggestion) or a saucer. Leave it in the fridge overnight and – ta-da! – it’s ready to slice and, I’m assured, delicious with salad.

But I want to eat it hot. Specifically, 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-scène. ‘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.’

Perhaps it’s revealing, though, that no one asks for the recipe.

The recipe
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 20 mins at 200C, then another 20 mins at 180C until the pastry is golden brown.

We bought our longhorn, Del Boy, at Ginger Pig. For further information about Borut’s butchery classes, see www.thegingerpig.co.uk.