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Ox Tongue, Potted
Take the remains of a boiled pickled tongue, and a small quantity of roasted meat or poultry, as tongue potted alone is a little too soft. Cut off the skin and hard parts. Weigh the meat, mince finely, and pound it in a mortar, with six ounces of fresh butter, a heaped tea-spoonful of powdered mace, a pinch of cayenne, half a tea-spoonful of pounded cloves, and half a nutmeg, grated, to every pound and a half of meat. Mix thoroughly. Press the meat into small potting-jars, and cover with clarified butter. Keep in a cool place. Time, one hour to prepare. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for a quarter of a pound. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A Victorian way of using up the last of a boiled salt tongue, and a good one — the spiced butter paste is essentially the ancestor of the potted meat you buy in jars. The one thing to change is how you store it.
- Storage is the real issueThe clarified butter seal was meant to let the jars sit in a cool larder for weeks. Do not rely on it: sealed, low-acid cooked meat held above refrigerator temperature is exactly the condition that favours Clostridium botulinum. Treat this as a fresh spread, keep it in the fridge, and eat it within three or four days.
- Pickled tongue"Boiled pickled tongue" means a tongue cured in brine (saltpetre and salt) and then simmered until tender — what a deli would sell as corned or salt tongue. Fresh boiled tongue works, but the mixture will taste flat and want more salt.
- Why the second meatThe instruction to add roast meat or poultry is the hinge. Tongue is fine-grained and fatty, and pounded alone it sets to something closer to paste than potted meat. The recipe asks only for 'a small quantity' of leftover roast beef, ham or chicken to give it body.
- ProportionsSix ounces of butter to a pound and a half of meat is about a quarter the weight of the meat — roughly 170 g to 680 g. Keep to it; less and the mixture will not pack or spread, more and it separates when it warms.
- The spicing is assertiveA heaped teaspoon of mace, half a teaspoon of cloves and half a nutmeg to a pound and a half is a strong hand by current taste, and ground cloves in particular dominate. Start at half the clove and nutmeg, mix, taste, and add more.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does in a couple of minutes what the mortar did by hand; the recipe allows an hour for the whole preparation. Mince the meat first, then pulse it with softened — not melted — butter, so the fat emulsifies rather than pooling.
- Clarified butterMelt butter gently, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milk solids behind; those solids are what spoil first. Chill the potted meat until firm before pouring a thin layer over the top, or the butter sinks in.
- Yield and costThe original's 1s. 6d. per quarter-pound is a period price and tells you only that spiced butter and cured tongue were not cheap. The stated five or six servings suits it as a first course or a sandwich filling with toast and something sharp — pickled walnuts, cornichons, mustard.
Potting was one of England's methods of keeping cooked meat before reliable refrigeration, alongside mainstays such as salting, drying, smoking and brining: pound the meat with butter, press out the air, seal the surface with more fat, and store it cold. Recipes of this type appear in English household books from the seventeenth century onward, and by the time Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s potted beef, ham, tongue, shrimps and game were standard breakfast and supper-table items in middle-class houses. The heavy mace, clove and nutmeg seasoning is a survival of much older English spicing, where the spices flattered the palate and were also believed to help the keeping. Tongue itself was a prestige leftover, boiled, pressed and served cold at large meals, and potting was what became of the ragged end of it, which is why this entry sits among the ways of using "the remains" rather than among the dishes proper.