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Collared Head

Collared Tongue is a dish of boiled pig tongues seasoned with salt, pepper, mint or sage, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,372 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Collared Head

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Salt the pig tongues for about a week.

Cook and skin

  1. Boil the tongues until tender and the skins can be easily removed.

  2. Keep the skinned tongues hot in a pan.

Shape and press

  1. Cut the tongues into pieces and place them in a basin.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper, salt, and minced mint or sage.

  3. Pour the boiling liquid over the tongues to fill the spaces.

  4. Press with a heavy weight until 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. Pepper + minttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Pigs' tongues
Form the meat that is cut, pressed and set into the collared shape.
Coarse sea salt
Cures the tongues over the week, seasoning the meat and firming its texture.
Liquid from boiling the tongues
Gelatin-rich cooking liquid that fills the gaps and sets as it cools, binding the pieces.
Minced mint leaves or sage
Adds a fresh, aromatic herbal flavour to the meat.

The step that matters

Press with a heavy weight until cold. Pressing while the liquid cools squeezes out air pockets and packs the pieces together, so the gelatin from the cooking liquid sets into a firm, sliceable collar rather than a loose, crumbly mass.

“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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