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Hashed Tongue

Hashed Tongue is a sautéed dish of boiled ox tongue with mushrooms, onion, parsley, sherry, lemon juice, and tomato sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Hashed Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Slice the boiled ox tongue and steep it in a mixture of lemon juice and oil for 1 hour.

  2. Drain the tongue and place it in a buttered frying pan with sliced mushrooms, minced onion, parsley, pepper, and salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Add sherry and lemon juice, then cook slowly for 15 minutes, ensuring the meat does not burn.

  2. Just before serving, add a little hot stock and tomato sauce.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled ox tongue
Forms the main meat, which becomes tender and flavourful as it cooks slowly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps tenderise the meat during steeping.
Sliced button mushrooms
Add moisture and savoury, earthy flavour as they release juices into the pan.
Sherry
Adds aromatic depth and a touch of sweetness and acidity to the sauce.
Tomato sauce
Adds colour, sweetness and tangy savouriness to the finished dish.

The step that matters

Cook slowly without letting the meat burn. Gentle, low heat lets the tongue warm through and absorb the pan juices while keeping it moist. High heat or dry pan contact scorches the sugars and proteins on the surface, producing bitter, burnt flavours and a tough texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, butter, mushroom, parsley, pepper, sherry, tomato):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, butter, mushroom, parsley, pepper, sherry, tomato. 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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