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Chicken and Tongue Sandwiches
Chop cold boiled tongue and chicken. Take equal quantities and mix with each pint of meat one-fourth cup of melted butter, the yolk of one egg beaten, a little black pepper, and one teaspoon of worcestershire sauce. Spread this over the buttered bread and trim off all the crust. Potted or canned minced meats of all kinds are much used for sandwiches.
The problem here is the binder: a raw egg yolk stirred into cold cooked meat and eaten straight from the bread, with no cooking step anywhere in the recipe.
- The raw yolk is the hingeNothing in this recipe reaches any temperature at all — the butter is melted, then the mixture is spread and served. An uncooked yolk carries a Salmonella risk that period cooks did not recognise, and it is doing nothing here that could not be done by a cooked emulsion. For a chicken and tongue spread today, use a current recipe.
- Cold cooked meat held warmChopped cooked poultry and tongue mixed with warm melted butter sits squarely in the range where bacteria multiply, and a spread of this kind could easily be made some time before it was eaten. The recipe gives no chilling instruction and no time limit.
- "Potted or canned minced meats"The closing line points at the commercial potted meats of the period, when processing standards were uneven and the contents of a tin were not always what the label claimed. Advice to reach for them is not advice to follow; it belongs to the history of the page rather than to its use.
- A pint of meatThe proportions are given by volume, not weight — a pint of chopped meat is roughly a pound, depending how finely it is cut. Butterick's readers measured chopped and minced things in cups and pints as a matter of course.
- TongueCold boiled beef tongue was a standing item in a well-run larder, sliced for supper and the trimmings turned into spreads. It is now a butcher's order rather than a supermarket item, and needs several hours of simmering and peeling before it is the "cold boiled tongue" this recipe assumes you already have.
- Crustless by designTrimming all the crust suggests a tea or reception sandwich rather than lunch — thin bread, mild filling, cut small. As written, the trimming comes after the spreading.
Chopped-meat sandwiches like this one belong to the age of the afternoon tea and the church reception, when a hostess might be expected to produce plates of small crustless sandwiches in several varieties. Tongue and chicken were a common pair: both were pale, both were mild, and both could come from the remains of a cold-meat course. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company that published The Delineator, and like its other domestic manuals it was addressed to a woman running a house without a professional cook — hence the frank endorsement of canned and potted minced meats, which were cheap and heavily advertised. The same period saw federal food and drug legislation aimed in part at exactly those products, which suggests how much faith the advice deserved.