Immigrant Kitchens: Russian Beef Tongue

In the latest entry from Immigrant Kitchens, Lindsay Sterling learns how to make Russian Beef Tongue from Yulia Converse and Alla Zagoruyko (read the story, get the recipe and see the photos).

Most animal parts come so deconstructed from the whole that I don’t think of animals at all when I’m cooking. Steak tips are steak tips. Hamburgers are hamburgers. This is perhaps how I’ve lived as a meat eater, in a kind of denial: I’m not eating animals, I’m eating meat. But recently I came face to face with an animal part that threatened my usual delusion. At a recent family reunion, my brother-in-law, Tom, gave me a gift from Vermont: the tongue of his young grass-fed, organic heifer.