Name: Baked Tongue
Ingredients: 1 tongue; coarse sea salt; 1 egg; 1 cup cracker crumbs; 1 pint water; black pepper

Why it works: Egg and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the tongue

Boil the tongue for 1 hour, then add salt and boil for another hour.
Remove the tongue from the pot, skin it, and remove all rough parts.

Coat and bake

Beat the egg in a bowl and roll the tongue in the egg and cracker crumbs.
Place the tongue in a baking pan and season well with salt and pepper.
Add 1 pint of the boiling water to the pan and bake.
Baste the tongue well while baking and serve with gravy or cream 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.

Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg: Binds the cracker crumbs so they adhere to the tongue as a coating.
Cracker crumbs: Form a crisp, browned coating on the outside of the tongue.
Beef tongue: The main protein, which the long boil tenderizes before baking.

“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.