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Boiled Beef Tongue

A boiled beef tongue served with a reduced gravy and optional sauce, garnished with lemon slices and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Boiled Beef Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the tongue

  1. Place the tongue in a pot with enough cold water to cover it.

  2. Add the carrot, onion, bay leaf, lemon slices, black pepper, salt, and garlic.

  3. Simmer gently for about 2 hours until tender.

  4. Remove the tongue from the pot.

Prepare and serve the tongue

  1. Skin the tongue.

  2. Trim the tongue.

  3. Serve the tongue whole or sliced.

  4. Arrange it in a ring.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the cooking liquid.

  2. Reduce the liquid to a gravy.

  3. Brown the flour in butter.

  4. Braise the garlic in the mixture.

  5. Gradually add the strained gravy, stirring until smooth.

  6. Add lemon juice or vinegar to taste.

  7. Serve the sauce with the tongue, garnished with lemon slices and parsley.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Beef tongue
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Flour
Browned in butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the sauce's base.
Garlic
Braised in the sauce base, adding aroma and savoury depth.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Cooking the flour in butter until lightly browned cooks out its raw taste and builds a smooth, stable thickener before the liquid is added. Adding the gravy too quickly or without stirring can leave lumps.

Swap the carrot

The recipe marks carrot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, lemon, pepper, clove, garlic, flour):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, lemon, pepper, clove, garlic, flour. 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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