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Sandwich (Chop cold boiled tongue fine)
Chop cold boiled tongue fine; season with salt and pepper and a tablespoonful of melted butter; mix and spread on rounds of toasted bread. Place leaves of watercress around edge on top of the toast and in the centre pile hard-boiled egg that has been chopped fine and mixed with a little mayonnaise dressing.
An open-faced sandwich rather than a closed one, and the tongue does the work. The only real difficulty is sourcing the meat.
- Cold boiled tongueBeef tongue is still sold at butchers and Latin, Kosher and Eastern European markets, usually 2-3 lb whole, and needs 2-3 hours of simmering plus peeling while hot before it can be chopped. The recipe assumes tongue already boiled and cold, i.e. a leftover; chopped deli tongue is a workable modern shortcut.
- The butter is the binderA tablespoon of melted butter into finely chopped tongue sets as the mixture cools and holds the spread together on the toast. Do not substitute mayonnaise here; the egg pile on top already supplies that.
- Chop, do not grindA food processor turns tongue to paste in seconds. Hand-chop to a coarse mince so the texture reads as meat.
- Rounds of toastCut with a 2 1/2 to 3 inch cutter before toasting, and toast dry and firm — the egg and mayonnaise will soften anything limp within minutes.
- Assemble lateBuild these no more than 20 minutes before serving. Watercress wilts fast against warm toast, and the point of the garnish is the peppery crunch.
- YieldRoughly 1/2 lb of chopped tongue and two hard-boiled eggs will dress about a dozen 3-inch rounds — a plateful for six as a tea or luncheon course.
- SeasoningIf the tongue is cured it will already be salty. Season the mixture after tasting, and be generous with black pepper instead.
Tongue was a standard cold-larder meat in Anglo-American households through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth: it was cheap, it boiled and pressed well, and once cooked it kept for days and sliced cleanly, which made it ideal sandwich material. Books of this type — collections built entirely around the sandwich, which proliferated in the 1900s and 1910s as afternoon tea, card parties and "dainty luncheons" became fixtures of middle-class entertaining — lean heavily on such leftovers, and the elaboration here is telling: rather than two slices of bread, the recipe calls for a round of toast, a ring of watercress and a centred mound of egg in mayonnaise, closer to a canapé than to lunch. The decline of tongue in American cooking is generally traced to the postwar retreat from offal and variety meats rather than to any change in the dish itself; the cut remains common in Mexican, Jewish and Central European kitchens.