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Beef Heart Equal to Tongue

Beef heart is soaked, boiled, stuffed with bread crumbs and butter, baked, sliced thin, and seasoned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Beef Heart Equal to Tongue

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 heart

  1. Soak the beef heart in a weak brine in the morning.

  2. Change to another brine in the evening.

  3. In the morning, cook the heart in boiling water for 3 hours until tender.

Stuff and bake

  1. Prepare a dressing by mixing bread crumbs with melted butter, pepper, and salt.

  2. Stuff the heart with the dressing and bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 20 minutes.

Serve

  1. Let it cool, then slice very thin and season with additional salt and pepper if needed.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef heart
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender through long slow cooking.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the melted butter and seasoning to make a moist stuffing that fills the cavity.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture to the bread crumb dressing and helps it brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Cooking the heart until tender. Beef heart is dense, lean muscle tissue. Cooking it long enough in gentle simmering water breaks down connective tissue so it becomes tender enough to slice thin.

“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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