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Spanish Tongue

Spanish tongue simmered in a tomato, onion, and allspice sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Cook the tongue in boiling water until tender.

  2. Peel the tongue and set it aside.

Make the sauce and simmer

  1. In a saucepan, combine the tomatoes, onion, green chili, allspice, and salt.

  2. Cook the sauce until it begins to thicken.

  3. Add the tongue to the sauce and simmer slowly for one hour.

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 + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together670 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Onion + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,270 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

Tongue
The main ingredient; slow simmering in the sauce keeps it tender and moist.
Tomatoes
Form the body of the sauce and add moisture and acidity.
Onion
Provides the savory base flavor of the sauce as it cooks down.
Allspice
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the tongue slowly in the sauce. Gentle, slow simmering lets the connective tissue in the tongue break down gradually, giving tender meat. A hard boil can toughen the surface and make the meat stringy.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, onion):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion. 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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