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Tongue Sandwiches
Chop very fine one pound of cold boiled tongue, spread between slices of buttered bread or tea biscuit.
Two lines of instruction that assume a cooked tongue already sitting in the cold larder. Most of the work is in sourcing and preparing the meat, which the original takes for granted.
- The tongueUsually beef tongue, simmered until a skewer slides in easily (upwards of three hours for a tongue of about 3 lb), then peeled while still warm and cooled under weight. Butchers and Latin American or Eastern European markets carry it; cured pastrami-style tongue is sold already cooked.
- Chopped, not slicedThe whole point of chopping very fine is texture: cold tongue cut in slabs is firm and slippery in a sandwich, while finely chopped it packs and holds. A few pulses in a food processor will turn it to paste, so use a knife or the coarse plate of a grinder.
- It needs a binderAs written this is dry minced meat between buttered bread. Other sandwich recipes of the period often moisten chopped meat with a little of the cooking liquor, melted butter, or mayonnaise, and season with mustard, pepper and a touch of vinegar or pickle; this one says nothing either way.
- Tea biscuitNot a cookie. In American books of this period a tea biscuit is a small soft baking-powder biscuit or plain sweet roll, split and buttered.
- YieldOne pound of chopped tongue makes about eight to ten modest sandwiches, or two to three dozen small triangles with the crusts off for a tea tray.
- Keeping it coldChopped cooked meat spoils faster than the whole piece. Mix it cold, fill close to serving, and keep filled sandwiches refrigerated under a damp cloth rather than sitting out through a hot afternoon.
Tongue was standard household meat in the nineteenth century, not a curiosity: cheap, sold fresh or in brine, boiled in a large pot and then pressed and kept cold to be sliced at will. Cold cookery of this kind suited households trying to feed people in summer without lighting the range again, and American cooking-school and domestic-science writers of the later nineteenth century did argue that heavy roasts and pastries were ill-suited to hot weather, recommending cold meats, salads and iced drinks instead.