Skip to main content
Main

Sheeps' Tongues, En Papillotes

Sheeps' tongues are cooked with butter, mushrooms, bacon, and herbs, then wrapped in oiled paper and broiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Sheeps' Tongues, En Papillotes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongues

  1. Soak the sheep's tongues in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Peel off the hard skin from the tongues and trim the roots.

Brown the tongues

  1. Melt butter in a stewpan and add the chopped mushrooms and bacon.

  2. Cook until nicely browned, then add the tongues.

  3. Remove the tongues when browned and set aside to cool.

Wrap and serve

  1. Cut pieces of white paper to wrap around the tongues.

  2. Dip the paper in oil and spread seasoning on each tongue.

  3. Wrap the tongues separately in the oiled paper.

  4. Broil the wrapped tongues lightly and moisten with oil.

  5. Serve the tongues wrapped in paper.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's tongues
The main meat, which becomes tender after soaking and gentle cooking.
Mushrooms
Release their juices as they cook, adding moisture and earthy flavour to the base.
Bacon
Renders fat that browns the pan and adds savoury, smoky flavour.
Butter
Carries the heat for browning and adds richness and a nutty aroma.

The step that matters

Browning the mushrooms and bacon. Deep browning develops savoury flavour through Maillard reactions. Pale, steamed mushrooms and bacon leave a flat, watery base that dilutes the flavour of the tongues.

“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

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes