I was stocking up on basics when I spotted an amazing selection of organs and offal, fresh from Peter McDonald’s farm in Romulus, NY. Tongue is one of the few offcuts that can make me a little squeamish; it lies in a no-man’s land between the basic tenets drummed in to me by my dad (”If you kill it, eat [all] of it”) and the kind of intriguing colloidal chemistry that some dishes require you to exercise.

Maybe it’s because as a cook, my tongue is a fundamental utensil, as basic and yet as essential as a wooden spoon, and a whole fresh beef tongue falls firmly into the category of cuts of meat that loudly proclaim their former status as living muscle. My omnivore friend Bernadette told me that as kids, she and her sisters ate beef tongue with gusto until the day they actually saw their mother preparing it. It took her years to recover her nerve and eat it again, even though she never stopped craving it in the interim.

But, hey, I refuse to be cowed by my own foibles, so I went for it - I grabbed the thing, brought it home and got right to it before I could bottle out. One of the restaurants I worked in served a tongue and foie gras terrine that I had assembled and plated often, but through some weird scheduling quirk I never ended up preparing the tongue itself (and it must have been the schedule, because believe me, “because it makes me wince” would not have been an acceptable excuse). I had vague memories of it blanching in a pot on the line during prep, so after consulting the reference library also known as my bookcase, I decided to go ahead using a simple poach with the classic mirepoix of onion, celery and carrot, and random additions of bay, parsley, thyme and black peppercorns. Because I had brought a fresh tongue, I could have salted it, but I wanted to see how the structure of the meat would change without the added influence of corning or brining.

One of the great things about tackling the peripheral cuts is that you have to take your time: there is no hyperspeed option when dealing with cartilage. I brought the whole lot up to a simmer very slowly, left it alone until the meat was tender, and then further ignored it while it cooled in the cooking liquid so that all the muscle fibers could draw the liquid back in as they relaxed and expanded. The end result was a surprise: gently beefy in flavor, and delicate in a way that’s totally different from the buttery melt-in-your-mouth texture of steak or slow-braised joints. By now I was slavering over the idea of a riff on a classic cold roast beef sandwich, so I sliced the tongue thin and teamed it with horseradish toned down with crème fraîche, and a garnish of lightly dressed cucumber. Technique learned, fears confronted, mission accomplished. That’ll do nicely.

do you think he’d approve?