Name: Another Way to Roast a Beef Tongue
Ingredients: 1 beef tongue; coarse sea salt; butter; brown gravy; currant jelly sauce

Why it works: Butter and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Another Way to Roast a Beef Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the beef tongue well and soak it in water for 2 hours.
Sprinkle coarse sea salt over the tongue and drain it in a colander for 2 hours.

Cook and roast

Boil the tongue slowly for 2 hours.
Remove the skin from the tongue and roast it, basting with butter.

Serve

Serve with brown gravy and currant jelly sauce.

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.

Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,847 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).
Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,856 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
Beef + saucetop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,650 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Beef + curranttop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,464 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Beef tongue: Is the main cut; slow boiling makes it tender before roasting.
Butter: Basting with butter adds fat and helps the surface brown during roasting.