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Tongue and Veal Sandwiches
Remove from cold tongue and veal every scrap of fat, gristle and skin. Grind in your meat chopper, moisten just a trifle with soup stock and season highly with paprika and a mere dash of nutmeg.
Spread lightly on thin white bread and serve very cold. A half warm meat sandwich is not appetizing. If you prefer a salad sandwich add to the ground tongue and veal a little mayonnaise. Another very dainty meat sandwich, which must be served crisp, is made from white Five Roses bread brushed lightly with butter, a crisp nasturtium leaf or sprig of watercress and a silver of highly seasoned cold chicken spread with a little mayonnaise.
A potted-meat spread built from leftovers, written for cooks who had cold tongue and cold roast veal sitting in the larder. The method is sound; only the shopping has changed.
- Sourcing the tongueWhole cooked beef tongue is now a butcher or deli order rather than a household staple. Sliced deli-style tongue works, or substitute a well-flavoured cooked ham for a similar salt-and-fat balance, though the texture will be looser.
- VealCold roast veal is uncommon and expensive. Cold roast pork loin or poached chicken breast stands in without changing the character of the spread, which relies on the tongue for flavour.
- "Meat chopper"A hand-cranked grinder. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the job, but stop while the mixture still has some grain — a continuous run turns it into paste.
- "Moisten just a trifle"The recipe gives no measure; start with about a tablespoon of stock per cup of ground meat and add more only if needed. The mixture should hold together when pressed, not slump. Too much and the bread goes damp before serving.
- The hingeServe genuinely cold. Ground cooked meat sitting at room temperature reads as greasy, which is what the original means by "a half warm meat sandwich is not appetizing." Chill the filling thoroughly, assemble close to serving, and keep the finished sandwiches covered and refrigerated.
- Seasoning"season highly with paprika" suggests enough to colour the mixture visibly. Sweet paprika is the safer choice; smoked paprika is unlikely to have been what the book meant. The nutmeg is a background note only — a few strokes on a grater for a full batch.
- Nasturtium leavesEdible and peppery, but only from plants you know have not been sprayed. Watercress is the easier option and gives the same bite.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, half a pound of trimmed meat yields something like a cup of filling, enough for several thin sandwiches cut into fingers or triangles.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour to Canadian households, and its sandwich recipes belong to the great era of the afternoon tea table, when thin white bread cut into small shapes was a mark of a well-run house. Sandwich fillings of this sort were frugal engineering: the Sunday joint and the boiled tongue reappeared on Wednesday, ground fine, seasoned hard and made unrecognisable. Paprika was a fashionable seasoning in North American cookbooks of the period, valued as much for the colour it gave pale mixtures as for its heat, and nutmeg in tiny quantity was a common grace note for potted mixtures.