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Bullock's Tongue, with Piquante Sauce

A braised ox tongue served with a piquante sauce made from onions, herbs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 10,173 recipes mention both. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Bullock's Tongue, with Piquante Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Wash the ox tongue in cold water.

  2. Place the tongue in boiling water for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the tongue, drain it, and cover it with cold water in a clean pan.

  4. Simmer the tongue for 2 hours.

  5. Add the carrots, turnips, celery, and sweet herbs; simmer for another hour.

  6. Remove the tongue and skin it.

Stew and serve

  1. In a stewpan, combine small onions, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns, thyme, ham, and scraped carrot with 1 quart of the boiling liquid.

  2. Add the tongue to the stewpan, cover tightly, and stew for 2 hours.

  3. Once done, place the tongue on a hot dish.

  4. Thicken the sauce with flour, mustard, and a small amount of scraped horseradish; bring to a boil.

  5. Pour the sauce over the tongue and serve.

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 together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tongue
Is the main meat, becoming tender through long gentle simmering that breaks down its connective tissue.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving it body.
Mustard
Adds sharp pungency that cuts through the richness of the sauce.
Scraped horseradish
Adds a hot, pungent aroma and bite to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the tongue covered and at a gentle simmer. Long, gentle, covered cooking lets the tough connective tissue in the tongue slowly break down into gelatin, making it tender. Boiling hard or uncovered can toughen the surface and dry the meat.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, celery, clove, thyme, ham, flour):

  1. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  2. Leekbetter flavor fit
  3. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, celery, clove, thyme, ham, flour. 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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