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Smoked Tongue

Smoked tongue is a beef tongue cooked slowly, peeled, sliced, and seasoned with cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Smoked Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Wash the beef tongue.

  2. Soak the beef tongue in cold water overnight.

Cook

  1. Place the tongue in a two-gallon pot.

  2. Cover the pot with boiling water.

  3. Cook gently for 5 to 6 hours.

Finish

  1. Remove the skin from the tongue.

  2. Slice the tongue into thin slices.

  3. Chop any remaining scraps. Mash the scraps into a paste.

  4. Season the paste with cayenne pepper for sandwiches.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Is the main meat, providing the dish's entire body and rich, savory flavor.
Cayenne pepper
Adds gentle heat to the mashed paste, sharpening its flavor for sandwiches.

The step that matters

Cook gently for 5 to 6 hours. Gentle, sustained heat below a hard boil lets the tough connective tissue in the tongue soften slowly and become tender without toughening the meat. Rapid boiling would tighten the muscle fibers and make the meat dry and stringy.

“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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