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Boiled Beef’s Tongue

A boiled beef tongue served with a tomato sauce thickened with crackers or breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,448 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Beef’s Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Wash, trim, and scrape the tongue.

  2. Soak the tongue in cold water for 30 minutes.

  3. Cover the tongue with hot water and boil slowly for 2 hours or longer until tender.

  4. Remove the tongue from the pot. Peel off the skin.

  5. Set the tongue aside to cool, then slice it thinly for sandwiches.

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Peel and slice tomatoes into a pot.

  2. Cook the tomatoes slowly, stirring often, until smooth.

  3. Stir in enough rolled crackers or bread-crumbs to thicken the sauce.

  4. Add cold meat gravy or butter before finishing.

Serve

  1. Serve the sliced tongue on a hot platter and pour the tomato sauce over it.

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. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

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

  3. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Bread + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Is the main meat; long slow boiling makes it tender enough to slice.
Ripe tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, providing acidity and a smooth body when cooked down.
Rolled crackers or fine dry bread-crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the tomato sauce.
Cold meat gravy or fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smoother, rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling the tongue slowly until tender. Gentle, prolonged simmering breaks down connective tissue in the tongue. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and leave it unevenly cooked, so it may not slice well.

“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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