Focus: Beef Tongue

Entire Beef Tongue in a Paris Supermarket

Beef Tongue with Curry in Hong Kong

Most of the times I have eaten tongue in my life it has been in the same shape as pictured in this Curry dish. I always wondered just what exactly the entire cow tongue looked like, whether all the tongue in the world came from veal cows and was just really small (because to me, the way the tongue is cut makes the slice of tongue still resemble what I thought an entire tongue would look like.) Luckily for me, I thoroughly explored all the meat sections of the supermarket in Paris and found a stack of entire cow tongues for sale! I really wanted to buy one to experiment with but I really wasn't staying in a place where I could sufficiently access the potential of an enormous cow tongue. Now that I have seen the entire cow tongue, however, I have come to the conclusion that the slices of tongue I had always thought were tongues unto themselves seem to be vertical slices of tongue.

My favorite tongue dish is still undoubtedly tongue tacos (tacos de lingua) in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. That being said, I am very young and with any luck there will be many tongues from many culinary traditions in my future.