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Deviled Tongue Sandwich
Run a quarter of a pound of cold boiled tongue through the meat chopper; add to it three hard-boiled eggs chopped fine, a dash of red pepper and paprika, a teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce, and two tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Mix and place between thin slices of lightly buttered bread with sprigs of watercress between.
A potted-meat filling of the kind that filled tea tables and picnic hampers before commercial sandwich spreads. It comes together in minutes once the tongue is cooked, and the only real decisions are texture and salt.
- The tongueBeef tongue is still sold at butchers and Latin and Eastern European markets, but it needs simmering for 2.5-3 hours until a skewer slides in easily, then peeling while warm and chilling before it can be chopped. A quarter pound of cooked tongue is what you want in the bowl, not a quarter pound raw. Good deli-sliced tongue works as a substitute.
- "Meat chopper"A hand-cranked grinder. A food processor pulsed six or eight times does the same job, but stop before it turns to paste; the filling should still read as chopped meat against the egg.
- Red pepperIn American books of this period "red pepper" means cayenne. With the paprika alongside it, start with a pinch of each and taste, since tongue is already salty and the Worcestershire adds more.
- Butter as binderTwo tablespoons of melted butter into a cold mixture will set solid within minutes and the filling stiffens in the refrigerator. Softened rather than melted butter is easier to work with, or let the mixture come back to cool room temperature before spreading.
- "Deviled"The word signals heat and sharpness, not a cooking method. Apart from melting the butter, nothing here goes near the stove once the tongue and eggs are cooked.
- Bread and watercressThin-cut white sandwich bread, buttered to the edges so the filling does not soak in. The watercress goes in whole sprigs as a layer, not chopped into the mixture, and should be added at the last moment or it wilts and weeps.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of filling, enough for four rounds of sandwiches, or sixteen small tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off.
- KeepingThe filling holds three or four days covered in the refrigerator. Assembled sandwiches do not; make them the same day they are eaten.
Tongue was a standard cold cut in Anglo-American households well into the twentieth century, when whole-animal butchery meant an offal cut was cheap, plentiful and unremarkable at table. Sandwich books of this sort appeared alongside the late nineteenth-century tea table, the packed lunch and the afternoon reception, which created demand for dozens of fillings. "Deviled" preparations, generally traced to English usage of around the turn of the nineteenth century for anything highly seasoned with cayenne and mustard, gave cooks a way to stretch small quantities of leftover meat into something that tasted deliberate. The hard-boiled eggs here are doing the same economical work, bulking out four ounces of tongue into filling for a whole plateful.