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Boiled Tongue

A preserved beef tongue boiled, salted, canned, and processed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and meat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,533 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Boiled Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the tongue thoroughly and rub it heavily with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let it stand with salt sprinkled over it for 8 to 10 hours.

Cook and peel

  1. Boil the tongue until fully cooked, then remove the skin.

Can

  1. Pack the tongue in cans with a little of the liquid it was boiled in, thinned with boiling water to reduce saltiness.

  2. Process No. 1 cans for 40 minutes at 250°F (120°C) or 15 pounds of steam pressure.

  3. Process No. 2 cans for 50 minutes at 250°F (120°C) or 15 pounds of steam pressure.

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. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Forms the meat that is cured, cooked and preserved in the cans.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat during the long standing period.

The step that matters

Salting for 8 to 10 hours. Salt must be rubbed in heavily and given the full standing time so it penetrates the thick muscle evenly. Too little salt or time leaves the meat bland or unevenly seasoned, while the later thinning with boiling water reduces the saltiness that remains.

“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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