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Tongue, with Mustard Pickle Sauce

A dish of sliced boiled tongue served in a mustard pickle sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tongue, with Mustard Pickle Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Cut the boiled tongue into slices.

  2. Fry the slices in hot butter with minced onion.

Make the sauce

  1. Remove the tongue slices and add flour to the pan, cooking until brown.

  2. Pour in hot water and stir until combined.

  3. Strain the sauce and season with salt, pepper, and chopped pickles.

Serve

  1. Let the tongue slices soak in the sauce until ready to serve.

  2. Arrange the slices on a platter, overlapping, and pour the sauce over them.

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. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

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

  4. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled tongue
Is the main protein, sliced and served in the sauce.
Hot butter
Fat for frying the slices, adding richness and browning flavour.
Flour
Cooked in the pan to brown, then thickens the sauce when hot water is added.
Chopped pickles
Add acidity and tang to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until brown. Flour browned in fat develops a nutty, deeper flavour and helps thicken the sauce evenly. If it is left pale or allowed to burn, the sauce tastes raw or bitter.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, pepper, cucumber, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, pepper, cucumber, capers. 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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