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Beef's Tongue, a LA Jardiniere

A braised beef tongue served with diced vegetables and a browned flour gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Boil the beef's tongue for 1 hour.

  2. Skin the tongue and place it in a roaster on a layer of diced vegetables.

  3. Pour some of the boiling water over the tongue and cover it.

  4. Cook slowly for 2 hours if the tongue is large.

Make the gravy

  1. Remove the tongue and keep it covered and warm.

  2. Use a skimmer to take out the vegetables.

  3. Thicken the gravy with browned flour.

Serve

  1. Slice the tongue and arrange the vegetables around it.

  2. Pour some gravy over the dish and serve the rest in a sauceboat.

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 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. Potato + oniontop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,019 recipes

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

  4. Peas + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together949 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow, moist cooking.
Browned flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy and adds a toasty, nutty flavour.
Potatoes
Hold their shape as a starchy vegetable and help thicken the surrounding liquid as they cook.
Carrots
Add sweetness and colour to the dish as they soften in the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 2 hours if the tongue is large. Tongue is a tough muscle rich in connective tissue. Gentle simmering in liquid slowly converts collagen into gelatin, so the meat turns tender. Boiling hard can toughen and break the meat apart, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer.

Flavor stand-ins for the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, turnip, celery, potato, beans, onion):

  1. Lima beansbetter flavor fit
  2. Peasthe original
  3. Chickpeaabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Lentilsabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, turnip, celery, potato, beans, onion. 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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