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Braised Tongue with Aspic Jelly

Braised tongue served cold with a gelatinous aspic made from its cooking liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Braised Tongue with Aspic Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the tongue

  1. Boil the tongue until tender.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the tongue, onions, celery, cloves, salt, and pepper.

  3. Cover with the boiling liquid from the tongue.

  4. Add brandy, sugar, mace, thyme, and parsley.

  5. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

  6. Remove the tongue and strain the boiling liquid.

Make the aspic and serve

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Heat the gelatine until dissolved, then pour over the tongue.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tongue
Is the main meat, which becomes tender through long gentle simmering.
Gelatine
Sets the strained cooking liquid into a clear jelly, forming the aspic coating.
Brandy
Adds aromatic flavour to the braising liquid.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth to the braising liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer lets connective tissue in the tongue break down slowly and evenly, keeping the meat tender. A hard boil toughens the surface and can make the meat fall apart or stay firm.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, clove, pepper, brandy, sugar, thyme):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, clove, pepper, brandy, sugar, thyme. 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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