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Boiled Beef Tongue

A boiled beef tongue served with a gravy made from its cooking liquid, optionally flavored with horseradish, capers, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Boiled Beef Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the tongue

  1. Place the tongue in a pot and cover it with cold water.

  2. Add the carrot, onion, bay leaf, lemon slices, black pepper, salt, and garlic.

  3. Simmer gently for about 2 hours until tender.

Prepare the tongue

  1. Remove the tongue, skin it, and trim it.

  2. Serve whole or slice it and arrange in a ring.

Make the gravy

  1. Strain the cooking liquid and reduce it to a gravy.

  2. Brown the flour in butter, then add the strained gravy gradually, stirring until smooth.

  3. Add lemon juice or vinegar to taste.

  4. Serve the sauce with the tongue.

Optional sauce and garnish

  1. If desired, make a sauce with grated horseradish, bruised carrot, capers, and wine.

  2. Garnish with lemon slices and parsley.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Main protein that becomes tender during long, gentle simmering in the liquid.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and sweetness to the cooking liquid that becomes the gravy.
Flour
Browned in butter, its starch thickens the strained liquid into a smooth gravy.
Butter
Cooks the flour and adds richness and toasty flavour to the gravy.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer gently, do not boil. A hard boil toughens the meat's muscle fibres and makes the cooking liquid cloudy, while gentle simmering slowly softens the connective tissue until the tongue is tender.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, lemon, pepper, clove, garlic, flour):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, lemon, pepper, clove, garlic, flour. 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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