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Sheep's Tongues, Stewed

Stewed sheep tongues served with thick brown sauce, bread crumbs, and a brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sheep's Tongues, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the tongues

  1. Soak the sheep's tongues in salt and water for 2 hours.

  2. Boil them in stock until the skin peels off easily, then skin them.

  3. Let the tongues cool, then slice them into ⅓ inch thick pieces.

Make the brown gravy

  1. To make brown gravy, simmer stock with onion, carrot, parsley, clove, and celery for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the gravy, season with pepper and salt, thicken with brown thickening, and stir in a glass of port.

Brown and serve

  1. Dip the slices into the thick brown sauce and arrange them in a circle on a dish.

  2. Sprinkle the slices with bread crumbs, drizzle with oiled butter, and brown them in the oven at 400°F (200°C) or before the fire.

  3. Pour the sauce into the center of the circle and garnish with toasted sippets.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Sheep's tongues
Form the main meat, which is tender after soaking and simmering.
Thick brown sauce
Coats the slices and adds a rich, savoury moisture and colour.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the slices in the oven.
Oiled butter
Adds fat that helps the crumbs brown and gives a rich flavour.
Stock
Cooks the tongues and forms the base of the brown gravy.

The step that matters

Boil the tongues until the skin peels off easily. Boiling until the skin loosens shows the meat is cooked through and tender. Skinning too early tears the meat, and too little cooking leaves the skin stuck.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, bread, butter, onion, carrot, parsley, celery):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, bread, butter, onion, carrot, parsley, celery. 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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