Creation #5: Anchovy Balls and Tongue Mousse: YuckFest 2011

Not thrilled

 As you can see, Lydia was not thrilled by our recent Retro Food Experiment.  Apparently nothing livens up a party like anchovy balls! Maybe they had stronger gag reflexes in the '50's, because they weren't so much livening things as making us want to throw up. I think they would still have been frightening even if we had followed the recipe properly.

To make anchovy balls, you need anchovy paste, hard-boiled eggs, dry mustard, some other seasoning, chopped onions and green peppers, and 1/4 cup of parsely. Since funding for this experiment was slim, I decided all we really needed was the anchovy paste and we'd make it up from there. This turned out to be a mistake.

The first step was to mash the anchovy paste with the hard-boiled eggs. This was a  fragrant beginning to the day, as anchovy paste has a strong and unpleasant smell and eggs don't smell that great either. Lydia was gagging already as she tried to mash the two together. Anchovy paste is also visually appalling, especially when squeezed out of a tube.

The more ingredients we added to it, the less appealing it became. We had no mustard or parsley, so we added some chipotle seasoning and
a 1/4 cup of basil instead of parsley.  

      It took on the texture and             consistency of loose cat poop and probably smelled similar. We also realized that there was no way what we had mixed together was going to shape into balls. In an effort to make
the mixture thicker we added crumbled crackers. Didn't help. We then added flour. Still didn't help. Annoyed and tired of the smell, we decided to just slop them onto a plate into ball-like blobs and stick toothpicks into them anyway. We weren't excited to try them.

Getting them off the plate was a challenge as well. These soft, sticky blobs of fishy nastiness don't even fall when the plate is held up vertically and were almost impossible to get off the plate and into the mouth using only the toothpick. We tried for a little while and then I just used my fingers. I immediately regretted putting that anchovy ball in my mouth. I'm pretty open-minded, I enjoy sea-food, and I enjoy anchovies on my pizza. This did not prepare me for the frightening blast of salty fish atrocity that assaulted my tongue. I was stunned. How did people eat these? Were they served only at parties because you had to be drunk to enjoy them?

Anchovy balls should not be served at parties. Ever. They should be placed in the wild for animals to lick, or used to grout tile. They should not be consumed by anyone trying to have a good time, no matter how many cocktails you've had. If you serve these at a party your guests will run away and hate you forever. That being said, let's move on to our next delicacy, Tongue Mousse!

I know that people still cook regularly with cow tongue, but I never have. I had no idea what I was doing, and did not realize how expensive cow tongue is. Really, who knew cow tongue was so unreasonably priced? All I knew was that I needed two cups of ground tongue. We weren't sure how we were going to grind it. Perhaps if we had gone to the butcher we could have gotten the tongue already ground, but we went to Winco and bought a whole cow tongue. Everyone there thought we were weird and they had no interest in grinding it for us. Can you believe it? Also, cows have enormous tongues. Why do cows need all that tongue? I mean, look at that thing. It's huge.

Our first order of business was to cook the tongue. We decided to chop it into chunks and boil it on the stove. It was extremely gross to touch, it feels just like you'd expect it to, and was tough to saw through. We managed to get it into chunks and dropped into a pot of water to boil. That's when the magic happens!











Boiling tongue does some rather interesting things. For one thing, the aroma seemed to change from awful, to kind of good, to awful again. Also, all the tough or weird parts of the tongue separate and remove themselves from the main meat. We weren't sure if we were supposed to peel it or not, but it became obvious as the top parts hardened and turned white which parts we should remove. Then we had to turn it into ground tongue. Lydia suggested the blender, and while the thought of sticking chunks of cow tongue into the blender was kind of gross I agreed we had little choice. It blended a lot better than we expected.

While Lydia was grinding the meat I decided to prepare the gelatin. Since  for the Tongue Mousse I only had an ingredients list and not a full recipe, I decided to use my new-found aspic skills to make my own recipe. I knew the gelatin was made with beef stock, but I decided the gelatin probably needed to be soften first, like when we made the ham and cheese loaf. I sprinkled gelatin onto cold water to let it soften (then was horrified when my photographer decided to stick her fingers in it), then prepared the beef stock to pour in.

Once the gelatin was dissolved I added the mayonnaise, seasoning, and chopped onions, then put the gelatin in the freezer to gel up a bit. Really, I'm turning into the aspic master at this point. When the tongue was good and ground, and the gelatin had gelled up nicely, we mixed the meat in and were ready to pour this foul-looking sludge into the mold.

There was no way we were waiting hours for this gelatin to set. The whole house smelled like fish balls and tongue, and at this point we'd rather just get this over and done with. We stuck the mold in the freezer and waited until we felt it was set enough. We'd done this enough times now we felt a little more comfortable taking short-cuts. There was a little concern when we used our warm water technique to loosen the gelatin from the mold and the gelatin didn't come out. We ended up having to submerge the mold in warm water three times before we finally got it out of the mold, but it came out beautifully. Frankly, it was probably our most successful-looking mold to date.

We didn't have any extravagant garnish planned out for this aspic, so Lydia decided the dried tip of the cooked cow tongue would make a lovely centerpiece.

Tongue Mousse does not have a bad flavor. The bad part about it is that it's basically cold meat Jell-O, and that makes it kind of weird and unappetizing. Flavor-wise, though, I thought it wasn't bad. I don't think Lydia agreed.

 

Photographs by *Tiare*