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Sheep's Tongue Stewed

A stew of sheep tongues simmered in gravy with parsley, mushrooms, onion, butter, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sheep's Tongue Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongues

  1. Place the sheep's tongues in cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Once tender, remove the skins and split the tongues.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, lay the tongues and cover them with good gravy.

  2. Finely chop parsley, mushrooms, and onion.

  3. Mix the chopped vegetables with a lump of butter.

  4. Add pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

  5. Stew the tongues in the gravy until tender.

  6. Transfer the tongues to a dish.

  7. Strain the gravy.

  8. Pour the hot gravy over the tongues.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's tongues
Form the main body of the dish and become tender through long simmering.
Good gravy
Provides the liquid that cooks the tongues and forms the sauce for serving.
Mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy flavour and body to the finished sauce.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth as it softens in the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the chopped vegetables a rounded, silky flavour.

The step that matters

Stew the tongues until tender. Tongue is a tough muscle that needs slow, moist heat to break down its connective tissue. Stopping too early leaves it firm, while boiling it hard can toughen the meat and make it stringy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, mushroom, butter, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, mushroom, butter, pepper. 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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