Skip to main content
Main

Langue De Bceif Piquee- — Neal’s Tongue Larded

A beef tongue prepared by salting, boiling, and larding with seasoned bacon, then braised and served heart-shaped.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Langue De Bceif Piquee- — Neal’s Tongue Larded

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the tongue

  1. Remove the root and gullet from the tongue and rub it well with coarse sea salt.

  2. Hang the tongue to drain.

  3. Wipe the tongue the next day.

  4. Let the tongue sit in salt for one day.

Prepare and lard

  1. Boil the tongue for half an hour.

  2. Blanch the tongue and remove the skin.

  3. Roll fresh-cured fat bacon in a seasoning of pepper, salt, cloves, mace, cinnamon, nutmeg, parsley, knotted marjoram, chives, and minced garlic.

  4. Lard the tongue all over, leaving a small space from the root to the tip.

Braise, glaze and serve

  1. Braise the tongue.

  2. Glaze the tongue.

  3. Cut the tongue in two, except at the two extremities.

  4. Arrange the cut tongue on a dish in the shape of a heart.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Nutmeg + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together687 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Neat's tongue
Is the main meat, which becomes tender through boiling and braising.
Fresh-cured fat bacon
Adds fat and moisture as it melts into the tongue during braising.
Coarse sea salt
Cures the tongue, seasoning it and firming its texture before cooking.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the bacon seasoning.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma to the bacon seasoning.

The step that matters

Leave a small space when larding. Larding threads fat through the meat, and leaving a gap at each end keeps the bacon from running out and lets the cut ends hold together after slicing.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, parsley, marjoram, chive):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, parsley, marjoram, chive. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes