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Baked Tongue

Baked Tongue is a cured and baked beef tongue seasoned with salt, spices, and brown sugar, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baked Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cure

  1. Season the tongue with coarse sea salt, saltpetre, brown sugar, pepper, cloves, mace, and allspice.

  2. Let it cure for two weeks.

  3. Remove the tongue and place it in a pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Add butter on top and cover with bread crumbs.

  2. Bake at 300°F (150°C) until tender enough for a straw to pass through easily.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Tongue
Is the main meat, which becomes tender through curing and slow baking.
Saltpetre
Helps cure the meat, giving it a firm texture and a pink color.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the salt during curing.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture, helping the surface stay rich while it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crust on top that adds texture and helps hold in moisture.

The step that matters

Bake until tender enough for a straw to pass through easily. Tongue is a tough muscle full of connective tissue. It needs long, gentle heat to break that tissue down. Pulling it too early leaves it chewy, so test with a straw rather than relying on time alone.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, pepper, clove, allspice, butter, bread):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pepper, clove, allspice, butter, bread. 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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