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Tongue Toast

A dish of sliced boiled tongue served on toast with butter, water or soup, salt, pepper, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Tongue Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Slice the tongue.

  2. Cut each slice into small pieces.

Cook

  1. Heat the pieces in a pan with a little butter.

  2. Moisten with warm water or clear soup to prevent burning.

  3. Add salt and pepper.

  4. Stir in 2 beaten eggs.

  5. When set, arrange neatly on toast.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tongue
Provides the main meaty body and savoury flavour of the dish.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the tongue pieces into a soft, cohesive mixture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the pieces brown gently in the pan.

The step that matters

Moistening before the eggs. Adding warm water or clear soup keeps the pieces from scorching in the pan. Egg proteins set quickly under high heat, so the mixture should be stirred gently and removed once set to stay tender rather than dry or rubbery.

“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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