Skip to main content
Main

Feesh Beef Tongue

A dish of beef tongue cooked with cloves, coated in egg yolk and breadcrumbs, roasted with butter, served with wine‑flavored brown gravy and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Feesh Beef Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stick the tongue with cloves.

Cook

  1. Boil the tongue gently for 3 hours.

  2. Brush the tongue with the egg yolk.

  3. Dredge it well with bread crumbs.

  4. Roast the tongue, basting it well with butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with brown gravy flavored with wine and slices of 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Wine + curranttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Is the main cut; long gentle boiling makes it tender before roasting.
Egg yolk
Brushed on the tongue to help the bread crumbs adhere and brown in the oven.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the outside of the tongue as it roasts.
Butter
Basting adds richness and helps the surface brown and stay moist.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the brown gravy.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and tartness that balance the rich gravy and meat.

The step that matters

Boil the tongue gently for 3 hours. Gentle simmering, rather than a hard boil, keeps the meat tender and prevents the outer layers from toughening and breaking apart. Cooking long enough breaks down connective tissue so the tongue becomes soft before roasting.

Swap the clove

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, egg, bread, butter, wine, currant. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes