Lingua Franca

Get 1,000 larks. Remove their tongues and set aside. Discard the larks.

Put the tongues in a pan with a little oil and saute quickly.

Transfer to a hot platter. Serves four.

Recipe from Pompeii Food and Drink.

I’m not sure if the Roman larks tongue thing is a myth – how can a culture, even one as robust about life as Rome, destroy such a beautiful thing only to yield a morsel the size of a child’s tooth?
The dish has come to symbolise everything that is spoiled and decadent about the last days of an empire, but at least one could argue that they knew no better.  In the death rattle of two other Empires we trudge on, darkly contemplating revolution, storming the barricades. There is little delight to be had on these shores. We are exhausted and hope seems very small. We are submerged in so many ironies. Today (11 November) in Europe we will remember the millions who died that we may live in free democracies.

I am searching for food to match this mood – “This Happy Breed” Zeitgeist. It must be cheap, but it must also be cheerful. This State of the Nation is, after all, is what most of our compatriots wanted, however incomprehensible that may be to us. Above all, of course, this food must not smack of “foreignness”, in itself a hard state to define. Britain has been a mongrel race for millennia and the United States is a nation of migrants apart from the Aboriginal people and even they, on the northeastern seaboard have a smattering of Viking DNA. We are all foreign, it is hard to know where to draw the line (though clearly not for some).

And so, enter Lady Agnes Jekyll, DBE (who was actually Scottish, but we will gloss over that). Her Kitchen Essays were first published in The Times in 1922. Her writing takes you at once into a lovely busy English country house. There are many staff of course, and a substantial budget, but there is no bling and Agnes will roll her sleeves up and get stuck in with Cook where necessary. You gallop through her book, wishing she was your friend, always kind, gracious and helpful. Chapters include – For the Too Fat, Bachelor’s Entertaining, Food for the Punctual and Unpunctual and, unsurprisingly, she has an excellent recipe for English workaday ox-tongue, for you just know that, despite some rather good pearls, Lady J would have no truck with the frippery of larks’ tongues. And, more core to her character, no truck with hatred of those different to her, or less fortunate. When she wrote, much of the country was still reeling from the effects of the Great War, still grieving for fathers, sons and brothers and suffering the devastating effects of the loss of a breadwinner:

“ …. narrow homes whither the vicissitudes of fortune have driven the dispossessed in yearly increasing numbers. Such are not the cottages of gentility with double coach-houses, where the pride that apes humility caused the devil to grin when he took his malicious walks abroad. Rather they are the last entrenchments of those whose treasure is no longer on earth ..”

and she goes on to suggest economic recipes. It is easy to dismiss Agnes Jekyll as a privileged white woman. We are so bombarded with images of an ersatz past, reduced circumstances at the Great House, the post boy cycling up the path with the telegram that will change their lives forever, the acidic bon mots of the Dowager that it becomes a pastiche which taxes us not at all. But Agnes was a real person, patron of the Pre-Raphalite Brotherhood, philanthropist and I think, the best of a certain sort of British person.

Her recipe for tongue is the classic marinade, followed by smoking for two days (I think you need a Great House to do it properly).

But, scout around independent butchers. My local one has ready cooked tongues for £6 each, and they will easily feed five. I usually do a sauce of conrichons and capers, but I recently found this. I think Agnes would have approved. It is one of the classic dishes of Poland.

From The Good Cook (Offal) ed Richard Olney (1981)