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Beef Tongue Toast
Take the remains of a cold cooked tongue, grate it as finely as possible, add a little finely chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste, and form the mixture into a thin paste with the yolks of eggs. Make the mixture as hot as possible without boiling, turn it out on to slices of thin toast, dust over with breadcrumbs, brown the surface with a salamander, or in front of the fire, and serve.
A savoury for using up the tail end of a boiled tongue, built on the same principle as a devilled toast. The whole thing turns on holding the egg yolks below a simmer so they thicken the meat paste rather than scramble it.
- The hinge: heat, don't cookYolks set between about 150F and 165F, so warm the mixture in a heavy pan over low heat or in a bowl over hot water and stir constantly. The moment it looks grainy it has gone past the point of no return and no amount of beating will bring it back.
- SalamanderIn this period the salamander was typically a flat iron plate on a long handle, heated in the fire and held over the surface to glaze it; larger hotel kitchens also had fixed gas versions. A broiler element on high, with the pan four inches beneath it for a minute or two, does the same job.
- How much tongue, how many yolksThe original gives no quantities at all. Two yolks will bind roughly a cup of grated tongue into a spreadable paste; add a third only if the mixture is still crumbly, since excess yolk makes it eggy and loose.
- GratingCold pressed tongue grates cleanly on the coarse side of a box grater, and a few pulses in a food processor gets there faster. Warm or freshly cooked tongue smears rather than shreds, so chill it thoroughly first.
- SaltTongue is often brine-cured or pickled, so taste before adding any; the salt in the meat may well be enough, and the pepper is doing the more useful work here.
- Getting the crumbs to brownDry breadcrumbs under a broiler scorch in patches unless they have some fat. Toss them with a little melted butter before dusting, or dot the surface with butter, and they will colour evenly.
- ToastCut thin and toast it dry and firm, then trim the crusts. Soft or fresh bread collapses under the hot paste before it reaches the table.
- Yield and servingA cup of the mixture covers four small slices, enough for four as a savoury course or two as a light supper with mustard and watercress. Serve immediately; it stiffens as it cools.
Beef tongue was a standard item in a nineteenth-century larder, sold pressed and ready-sliced by butchers and served cold at buffets and railway hotels, which meant trimmings were a familiar problem in large kitchens. This recipe belongs to the English savoury tradition that American hotel cooking absorbed wholesale: a hot, salty, well-peppered morsel on toast, served after the sweet course or at supper, of which anchovy toast, devilled kidneys and Scotch woodcock are the better-remembered relatives. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms through the 1890s and after, when that menu grammar was still in force, and dishes of this kind — small things built from the previous day's cold meat — are the sort associated with his name. The salamander he calls for was, and in professional kitchens still is, a piece of standard equipment; the alternative he offers, browning "in front of the fire," is a reminder of how recently domestic cooking had left the open hearth.