Home › Sandwiches › Tongue Sandwiches
Tongue Sandwiches
Tongue sandwiches may be made by either chopping the tongue or cutting it into thin slices. Where the tongue is chopped it should be pounded as for chicken sandwiches, and highly seasoned.
A note rather than a recipe, written for a cook who already had a cooked tongue in the larder and knew what "pounded as for chicken sandwiches" meant. The gaps are easy to fill.
- The tongue itselfPresumably a whole beef tongue, simmered until tender (roughly 3 hours for a 3-lb fresh tongue), then peeled while still warm, pressed and chilled. Deli-sliced cured tongue works, and so does the smoked or corned tongue sold at Jewish and Eastern European butchers.
- "Pounded as for chicken sandwiches"The reference appears to be to a paste: the meat chopped fine, then worked in a mortar with butter until smooth and spreadable. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run the machine, or the paste turns pasty and gluey.
- Fat is what binds itChopped tongue alone will not hold on bread. Allow about 2 tablespoons of softened butter, or butter with a spoonful of cream, per cup of chopped meat.
- "Highly seasoned"Cookbooks of the period commonly seasoned such pastes with mustard, cayenne, a little mace or nutmeg, and sometimes anchovy paste or a few drops of Worcestershire. If your tongue is already cured, salt last and taste first.
- Sliced versus choppedSlice thinly across the grain; tongue cut with the grain is stringy. The tip is the leaner, finer-grained end and slices best, while the thick butt end is better chopped.
- Bread and holdingThin white bread, buttered edge to edge so the filling does not soak in. Made ahead, cover with a damp cloth and refrigerate; the paste keeps two or three days, sliced tongue rather less.
- YieldA 3-lb tongue yields roughly 1 1/2 lb of trimmed meat, enough for about two dozen small tea sandwiches.
Tongue was standard cold-larder meat in the late Victorian and Edwardian household, cured and sold whole by butchers and grocers and often bought ready-boiled in a tin or a mould. It sliced neatly and kept well, which made it a fixture of the sandwich chapter alongside chicken, ham and potted fish. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) belongs to the wave of American domestic manuals published by pattern and magazine companies for the middle-class housekeeper, and its telegraphic entry here is typical of the form: the reader is presumed to have cooked a tongue already and is told only what distinguishes this sandwich from the ones on the surrounding pages. The pounded, buttered meat paste it points to resembles English potting, a preservation technique in which cooked meat was pounded with butter and spices and sealed under a fat layer; by 1911 the seal had been dropped and only the texture and seasoning remained.