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To Stew Tongue

A stew of beef tongue seasoned with saltpetre, salt, soy sauce, mushroom ketchup, cayenne, cloves, and served with truffles, morels, and mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Stew Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Cure and boil

  1. Salt the tongue with saltpetre and common salt for a week, turning it daily.

  2. Boil the tongue until tender enough to peel.

Stew and season

  1. Stew the tongue in a moderately strong gravy.

  2. Season the tongue with soy sauce, mushroom ketchup, cayenne and pounded cloves, then add salt if necessary.

Serve

  1. Serve the tongue with truffles, morels, and mushrooms stewed in gravy.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tongue
Is the main meat, which becomes tender through curing and slow stewing.
Saltpetre
Cures the meat, helping it keep a pink colour and a firm texture.
Gravy
Provides the moist, savoury liquid in which the tongue is stewed.
Truffles
Add an intense earthy aroma to the finished dish.
Morels
Add a rich, earthy flavour and a meaty texture to the dish.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury depth to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Curing the tongue for a week. Saltpetre and salt must penetrate the whole tongue evenly, so turning it daily matters. Skipping turns can leave uneven curing, with spoiled or tough patches and an uneven colour.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, truffle):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, mushroom, ketchup, pepper, truffle. 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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