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Pickled Beef's Tongues

Pickled beef tongues are cured with salt, sugar, spices, and preserved in a pickling solution for 10–12 days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Beef's Tongues

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the roots of the tongues, leaving some fat.

  2. Sprinkle the tongues thickly with coarse sea salt and let them drain on a slanted board overnight.

Cure

  1. Mix together brown sugar, coarse sea salt, powdered saltpetre, ground pepper, ground cloves, ground allspice, and ground mace.

  2. Rub the mixture well over the tongues.

  3. Place the tongues in a pickling tub and let them stand in a cool place for 10 to 12 days, turning them daily in the pickle.

Finish

  1. After 10 to 12 days, the tongues can be dried, smoked, or cooked as desired.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongues
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and meaty as they cure and cook.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and preserves it during the cure.
Powdered saltpetre
Helps the cure keep its pink colour and preserves the meat during long curing.
Brown sugar
Balances the salt with sweetness and helps flavour the cure.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture well over the tongues. Salt and curing agents only penetrate where they touch the meat, so even coverage ensures uniform curing and prevents spoilage in spots.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, pepper, clove, allspice. 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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