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Tongue on Toast
1 cup of cold, boiled tongue or ham Yolks of two eggs 1/4 teaspoonful of mustard Dash of cayenne Chop the tongue or ham very fine. Beat the yolks until light, add them to tongue or ham, add the seasoning, stir the whole over the fire until the eggs are cooked. Serve immediately on squares of buttered toast.
A five-minute supper dish built on leftovers, and the whole thing hinges on how gently the eggs are handled.
- Low heat, and keep stirringTwo yolks with no added liquid will scramble into grains the moment the pan gets hot. Use the lowest burner setting, or a bowl over barely simmering water, and stir constantly until the mixture just thickens and holds together.
- "Over the fire"This means on the stovetop, over direct heat, in a small saucepan or skillet. Nothing here goes into an oven.
- MustardThe quarter teaspoon is almost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar, though the recipe does not specify. If you substitute prepared mustard, use about a teaspoon and expect the extra vinegar to loosen the mixture.
- TongueCooked beef tongue is still sold at butchers and in many Latin and Eastern European markets, usually needing several hours of simmering and peeling before it is the "cold, boiled tongue" the recipe assumes. Deli-sliced tongue, or good boiled ham, works as written.
- Chop, do not grind"Very fine" means knife-chopped to a coarse mince. A food processor will turn cured meat to paste and the dish loses its texture entirely.
- SaltNo salt is called for because tongue and ham are both cured and often salty enough. Taste before serving rather than seasoning at the start.
- YieldSomething over a cup of mixture, enough for roughly four small toast squares as a light lunch or two as a supper. It does not reheat well and is best taken straight from the pan to the toast.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late nineteenth-century American cookbooks aimed at the summer kitchen, when a coal range made a full dinner unbearable and the household cook wanted dishes that used up cold meat without lighting the oven. Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School published a volume under that title and campaigned for lighter warm-weather eating. Minced meats bound with egg and served on toast were one common answer to the problem of leftovers before refrigeration. The toast square was a mainstay of the period's breakfast and luncheon tables, doing the job now given to a bread roll or a piece of toast under a poached egg.