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Tongue Canapes
Toast one-fourth inch slices of graham bread, cut in rounds and fried in butter; mix cooked tongue that has been chopped fine with creamed butter till it is a paste, and add one tablespoonful of capers to a cupful of tongue. Spread on bread, add a dash of salt and cayenne, and sprinkle with a little finely chopped watercress.
A straightforward spread on fried bread rounds. The only real technique here is getting the tongue and butter to emulsify into a true paste rather than a lumpy mash.
- The hinge: creamed butter"Creamed butter" means butter beaten alone until pale and soft, not melted. It has to be at room temperature before the tongue goes in, or the mixture will stay granular instead of binding into a spreadable paste. A food processor does the job in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the tongue turns to gum.
- Toast and fryThe instruction is doing two things: the toasting dries the crumb so the rounds hold their shape, the butter-frying browns and crisps them. Skipping the toasting gives you a greasy round that goes soft under the spread. Cut the rounds before frying, roughly 1½ inches across.
- Graham breadGraham bread A coread, slightly sweet, named for Sylvester Graham's unsifted flour. Any dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf substitutes cleanly; avoid anything too open-crumbed, which soaks up the frying butter.
- TongueTongue The recipe says only "cooked tongue"; cured, boiled beef tongue is the likeliest intention, and ready-cooked tongue could generally be had from butchers and delicatessens. Vacuum-packed cooked tongue is still available at good butchers and Latin and Jewish groceries; if you start from raw, it needs 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer and the skin must be peeled while hot. Cured tongue is salty, so taste before adding the salt called for at the end.
- ProportionsA cup of finely chopped tongue is about 6 oz. Roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter brings it to a spreading consistency; add it gradually rather than all at once, since the moisture in the meat varies.
- CapersOne tablespoon per cup of tongue is a light hand by modern taste. Drain them, chop them coarsely so they distribute, and consider a teaspoon of the brine in place of some of the salt.
- WatercressChop it just before serving. Cut watercress wilts and darkens within an hour, and its pepperiness is the counterweight to the butter and the salt meat.
- Yield and servingA cup of tongue paste covers about 20 to 24 small rounds. Fry the bread and make the paste ahead, but assemble within half an hour of serving or the rounds soften.
Canapés in an Edwardian American household sat at the front of a formal dinner or, more often, on the tea and card-party table, and the pattern was often much the same: a small fried or toasted base, a seasoned meat or fish butter, a sharp garnish. Potted and creamed meats had a practical logic behind them, since a boiled tongue is a large, awkward object that has to be used up over several days, and pounding the remainder with butter was one common way to stretch cold cooked meat before refrigeration made leftovers casual. Capers and cayenne are generally traced to the same tradition — the pickle-and-pepper seasoning that English cookery had long applied to potted meats. Its canapé section is essentially the sandwich dressed for company: crusts gone, bread cut in rounds, everything reduced to two bites.