Skip to main content
Main

Spanish Tongue

A braised tongue served with a tomato, mushroom, and chili sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,719 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Spanish Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Boil the tongue until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the tomatoes, mushrooms, ground red chili, and Worcestershire sauce.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cream and add it to the sauce when ready to serve.

  3. Stir until the sauce thickens and serve over the tongue.

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. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

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

  2. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

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

  5. Sauce + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.
Cream
Mixed with the flour to carry it smoothly into the sauce, adding richness.
Tomatoes
Form the acidic, moist base of the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add savory, earthy flavor and soft texture to the sauce.
Ground red chili
Adds heat and warm pepper flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour mixed with cream should be stirred into the sauce near serving and kept moving while it heats. Flour added in one lump or left unstirred forms clumps, and it thickens only as the starch heats in the liquid.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, sauce, flour, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, sauce, flour, cream. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes