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Neat's Tongue, Potted
Take half a pound of cold boiled neat's tongue, with a small quantity of fat. Cut it into thin slices, and pound them in a mortar; season with half a tea-spoonful of white pepper, half a tea-spoonful of fresh mustard, and three or four grates of nutmeg; add, whilst pounding, two ounces of clarified butter. Press the meat into small potting-jars, and pour clarified butter over the top. Time, half an hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A straightforward potted meat: cooked tongue pounded smooth with butter and spice, then sealed. The only real technique is the pounding, and the only real decision is how long you keep it.
- Neat's tongue"Neat" is the old word for cattle, so this is ox or beef tongue — still sold by butchers, fresh or salted, and often available cooked and pressed. A whole tongue is far more than half a pound, so this is a recipe for leftovers from a boiled tongue rather than a reason to cook one.
- Cold and firmThe tongue must be thoroughly cold before slicing; warm meat smears rather than pounds and the butter will split. Chill it fully, and peel off the rough outer skin if that was not done after boiling.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in seconds what the mortar does in many minutes, but it gives a smoother, more uniform paste. If you want a coarser, slightly fibrous texture, pulse briefly or chop finely by hand and then work in the butter.
- Fresh mustardThis most likely means mustard freshly mixed from powder and water rather than a ready-made bottled paste. Mix a scant half-teaspoon of English mustard powder with a few drops of cold water and let it stand ten minutes before adding, so the heat has time to develop.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces (about 4 tablespoons) goes into the meat; you will need a further 2-3 oz melted and poured over to seal. Clarify properly — the milk solids left in ordinary melted butter are what turn a potted jar sour.
- The butter seal is not preservationIn a Victorian larder the seal kept air off for a week or two. Treat it as nothing more than a lid: refrigerate the jars and eat within three or four days. A sealed, airless, low-acid meat paste held at room temperature is exactly the condition to avoid.
- Seasoning and yieldHalf a pound of meat feeds two or three as a savoury spread on toast, and fills roughly two small ramekins. Taste before potting — tongue that was salt-cured needs no extra salt, while fresh-boiled tongue usually does.
Potting was the English answer to the terrine: cooked meat pounded to a paste, packed tight to exclude air, and sealed under a cap of clarified butter that set hard and kept the surface from the atmosphere. It appears throughout eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household books for beef, tongue, ham, game, char and shrimps, and it existed as much for economy as for luxury — a way of turning the last of a joint into something that could be carried, kept in a cold larder, and set out at breakfast or supper. Cassell's gives the probable cost as 1s. 6d., a reminder that these entries were written for a household keeping accounts, where the price of a dish was as much a part of the recipe as the nutmeg. Boiled ox tongue itself was a staple of the Victorian cold table, often pressed into a round mould and glazed, and the potted version is simply what became of it once the handsome centrepiece had been carved down to scraps.