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Beef Tongue Boiled

Beef tongue boiled until tender, then sliced and served with rice, mashed potatoes, or dried peas purée, garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,855 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Beef Tongue Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the tongue and soak it in cold water overnight.

  2. The next day, place the tongue in a kettle and cover it with fresh cold water.

Cook and peel

  1. Boil the tongue until tender.

  2. Remove the skin and trim it carefully.

  3. If serving cold, let it cool in the boiling water for richness.

Serve

  1. Slice the tongue thinly and serve on a platter with curled parsley.

  2. Serve garnished with rice, mashed potatoes, or a purée of dried peas.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Rice + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Potato + peastop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,016 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Rice + peastop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,434 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Is the main meat, becoming tender and rich during long, gentle boiling.
Cold water
Soaks and covers the tongue, drawing out blood and keeping the meat moist while it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the tongue until tender. Tongue is a tough, muscular cut that needs long, gentle simmering so its connective tissue breaks down. A hard, rapid boil can toughen the outer meat and make it uneven, so keep the water at a gentle simmer.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, rice, potato, parsley):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, rice, potato, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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