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To Pot Tongues

A dish of boiled ox tongue seasoned with saltpetre, brown sugar, pepper, sea salt, mace, and clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Pot Tongues

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the tongue

  1. Mix saltpetre and brown sugar.

  2. Rub the tongue with the mixture and let it sit for 2 days.

Cook and pot

  1. Boil the tongue until tender, then remove the skin and side bits.

  2. Slice the tongue thinly and beat it with clarified butter in a marble mortar.

  3. Season with pepper, salt, and mace, then pot as usual.

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. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  4. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Helps cure the tongue and keeps its pink colour during curing.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.
Neat's tongue
Is the main meat, which becomes tender through boiling and is then pounded smooth.
Clarified butter
Adds fat and richness and binds the pounded meat into a spreadable paste.

The step that matters

Rub the tongue with the mixture and let it sit for 2 days. The cure must reach evenly through the meat during the full resting time, or parts of the tongue stay uncured and may spoil. Rubbing the mixture into every surface and keeping the tongue cold while it rests helps the salt and saltpetre penetrate.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, pepper. 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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