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Braised Tongue

Braised tongue cooked with stock, vegetables, and seasonings, then baked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By United Methodist Church (Grayville, Ill.) · From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 10,172 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Boil and salt a tongue until tender (two or three hours), skin it and remove fat.

Make the sauce

  1. Cream two tablespoons of flour and two tablespoons of butter, then stir in two quarts of stock.

  2. Dice the vegetables: one carrot, one onion, one potato, one turnip, one stalk of celery, and five cents worth of fresh parsley.

  3. Add the diced vegetables, two bay leaves, one tablespoon of catsup, one tablespoon of Worcester sauce, pepper, and salt to taste to the stock mixture. Stir all of this until it boils.

Bake

  1. Put the tongue in a baking dish and pour stock around it.

  2. Bake for two hours, basting often.

By United Methodist Church (Grayville, Ill.). 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. See the original page.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,001 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + potatotop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,019 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,105 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,417 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavor while forming a roux with the flour.
Tongue (in the method)
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long simmering and baking.
Stock
Forms the braising liquid that moistens and flavors the tongue.

The step that matters

Basting during the two-hour bake. Repeated basting keeps the surface of the tongue moist and helps it stay tender and flavorful as the liquid reduces in the dish.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sauce, carrot, potato, turnip, celery):

  1. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  2. Leekbetter flavor fit
  3. Tomatoabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sauce, carrot, potato, turnip, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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