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Roasted Beef's Tongue

Roasted beef tongue prepared by soaking, boiling, skinning, roasting with butter, served with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,847 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

Roasted Beef's Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and boil

  1. Soak the fresh tongue in a mixture of strong salt and water for several hours.

  2. Drain the tongue well and boil it slowly for 2 hours.

Roast and serve

  1. Remove the skin from the tongue and roast it, basting with butter while cooking.

  2. Serve with currant jelly.

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

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

  2. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Beef + curranttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,464 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
The main meat; slow simmering breaks down its connective tissue so it becomes tender.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the surface brown during roasting.
Currant jelly
Its sweetness and acidity balance the rich, savoury meat.

The step that matters

Boil the tongue slowly. Boiling it too hard toughens the meat and can break it apart. A gentle simmer lets connective tissue soften slowly, which makes the tongue tender before roasting.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Grapefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter. 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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