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Potted Beef Tongue
Put a pickled tongue into a saucepan of water and boil it for three hours or until tender; plunge it into cold water for a few minutes, take out and skin it. Chop it up small and pound it in a mortar to a paste. Put two breakfast cupfuls of butter into a saucepan to melt, add one teaspoonful of mixed ground spices, having half mace, and the remainder nutmeg, cloves, and cayenne in equal proportions to the tongue, and a little salt if required, and lastly the clear part of the melted butter. Pound and mix thoroughly, press the mixture into jars, pour over more melted butter, cover the jars and keep them in a dry place till wanted.
This is a nineteenth-century potting recipe: cooked meat pounded to a paste, packed into jars and sealed under a layer of clarified butter for storage at room temperature. The cooking itself is unremarkable, but the preservation method is the whole point of the dish and it is the part that fails modern standards.
- The butter seal is the hazardPressing meat paste into a jar and pouring melted butter over it creates exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid, room-temperature environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Nothing in the recipe — not the boiling, not the spices, not the salt from the pickle — reliably prevents this, and the toxin is odourless and tasteless.
- "Keep them in a dry place till wanted"Dry is not the relevant variable; temperature is. A Victorian larder was cold for much of the year, an assumption the text never states and a modern kitchen does not meet. How long such jars actually sat before being eaten is not stated here and would have varied.
- No measured cureThe recipe depends entirely on a "pickled tongue" whose brine strength, nitrite content and curing time are unspecified. Safe cured-meat preservation requires weighed salt and curing salt against a weighed piece of meat, held at a controlled temperature. None of that is here.
- Pounding spreads contaminationThe tongue is skinned, chopped and worked by hand in a mortar after cooking, then never reheated. Any organism introduced during that handling goes straight into the sealed jar.
- If you want potted tongueUse a current recipe that treats the paste as a fresh product — refrigerated and eaten within a few days, or frozen — rather than a shelf-stable preserve.
- Reading the originalA breakfast cupful is roughly a standard cup, though the term was elastic and was sometimes taken as nearer half a pint; either way, two cupfuls of butter is a great deal, which tells you the butter here is structural rather than seasoning. Mace with nutmeg, cloves and cayenne is a common English potting mixture, and mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, not a substitute for it.
Potting is one of the oldest English methods of keeping cooked meat: the flesh is pounded fine, spiced, packed tight to exclude air and sealed under clarified butter, a technique in print since at least the seventeenth century and still routine in Victorian households that had no mechanical refrigeration. Tongue was a favourite subject because a pickled ox tongue was cheap, arrived already cured, and cooked down to a smooth, pale paste that spread well on bread. Potted ham and potted shrimps were staples of the tea table and the picnic hamper. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder that even the Waldorf's kitchen, at the turn of the twentieth century, still kept up preservation habits inherited from an earlier era.