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Pickling Tongues

A preserved tongue cured with salt, sugar, saltpetre, and water, left to sit for weeks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 37% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,435 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Pickling Tongues

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongues

  1. Soak the tongues in cold water for 24 hours (12 hours for hog and calf tongues).

  2. Drain and dry the tongues with clean muslin.

  3. Make small cuts into the sides of the beef tongues.

Cure

  1. Rub the tongues thoroughly with the salt, sugar, and saltpetre mixture.

  2. Let the tongues sit for 14 days to 3 weeks for the pickling mixture to penetrate.

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. Sugar + beeftop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat while preserving it during the cure.
Sugar
Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured meat.
Saltpetre
Helps the cure keep its pink colour and inhibits spoilage bacteria during long curing.

The step that matters

Rubbing the tongues thoroughly with the cure. Salt and saltpetre only preserve the meat where they touch it, and they penetrate slowly. Uneven coverage leaves spots that spoil or cure unevenly over the long rest.

“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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