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Potted Tongue
Rub a beef tongue well with one-fourth pound of brown sugar, and one ounce of saltpeter. Leave it for two days; then boil it until it is tender. Drain and skin the tongue, cut it into small pieces, and pound them to a smooth paste in a mortar with one pound of clarified butter. Season to taste with pepper and salt, and add a small quantity of pounded mace. Press the paste into small jars, cover with parchment, and tie them down.
This is a nineteenth-century preserving recipe, and it fails on two separate counts: the amount of curing salt and the sealed, unrefrigerated storage. The notes below explain what the ingredients were and where the danger lies.
- The saltpeter is far out of rangeSaltpeter is potassium nitrate. One ounce is roughly 28 grams rubbed onto a single tongue of three to four pounds — on the order of ten times the nitrate a modern dry cure would allow for a piece of meat that size, even allowing that some of a surface rub is lost in draining and boiling. Modern cures deliver nitrate and nitrite in a heavily diluted, pre-measured blend precisely because eyeballing the pure salt is not safe.
- An uncontrolled two-day cure"Leave it for two days" gives no temperature. A raw tongue rubbed with sugar and left at kitchen temperature for 48 hours is a curing step in name only; the sugar feeds spoilage organisms as readily as it feeds the cure.
- Sealed potted meat is a botulism riskCooked meat paste packed into jars and closed with tied parchment is a low-oxygen, low-acid, moist environment — the conditions Clostridium botulinum favours. The recipe assumes a cold larder and rapid use, neither of which it states, and neither of which makes the pack shelf-stable.
- No processing step at allNothing after the boiling brings the filled jars to a temperature that would destroy spores, and no acid or measured salt level is specified to inhibit them. If you want potted tongue, use a current recipe with stated refrigeration and a stated keeping time.
- What the ingredients wereClarified butter is butter with the milk solids and water removed; here it is pounded into the paste rather than poured over as a seal, though the same keeping quality is the reason potting recipes favour it — whole butter's milk solids spoil. "Pounded mace" is the ground aril of nutmeg, warmer and lighter than the nut itself; the two are not interchangeable by volume.
- Parchment, not baking parchmentThe parchment here is a stiff skin or vegetable parchment tied over the jar mouth with string — a dust cover for a cold larder, not a hermetic seal. Reading it as a modern preserving lid overstates what the original claimed.
Potting was the standard English way of keeping cooked meat before reliable refrigeration: pound the flesh to a paste, pack it tight to exclude air, and cap it with a layer of clarified butter that set hard and kept the surface from the atmosphere. Recipes for potted tongue, potted beef, potted shrimps and potted game run through English household books from the seventeenth century onward, and the technique crossed into American cookery intact. Its appearance in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection reflects a hotel kitchen that still made its own larder stores and used every part of the animal. Tongue stood in its own right on late-Victorian menus. The saltpeter rub is the older element: nitrate was valued as much for fixing the pink colour of cured meat as for its preservative effect, and it was sold plainly by the ounce at the chemist.