Skip to main content
Main

Beef Tongue Spiced

A beef tongue cured with sugar, cloves, saltpetre, and salt, then coated in flour paste and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Beef Tongue Spiced

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Rub the sugar, cloves, and saltpetre into the tongue.

  2. Immerse the tongue in a brine made of salt and water, keeping it well covered for 1 week.

  3. After a week, remove the tongue, wash it well, and dry it with a cloth.

Paste and bake

  1. Make a thin paste of flour and water.

  2. Wrap the tongue in the paste.

  3. Bake slowly in a pan.

  4. Baste well with lard and water while baking.

Finish

  1. Remove the paste and skin, then serve.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Clove + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Beef tongue
Is the meat itself; long slow cooking softens its tough connective tissue into tender bite.
Sugar
Balances the salt and adds mild sweetness to the cured flavour.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice that flavours the meat during curing.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured tongue its characteristic colour and flavour.
Flour
Forms a paste casing that seals in moisture while the tongue bakes slowly.
Lard
Adds fat for basting, keeping the surface moist and encouraging browning.

The step that matters

Keep the tongue fully covered in brine for the whole week. Any part of the meat exposed to air can spoil or cure unevenly, so keeping it completely submerged and covered is what allows the salt and sugar to penetrate evenly and preserve it safely.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, flour. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes