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Tongue in Currant-juice

A stew of beef tongue simmered in currant juice or jelly with butter, salt, pepper, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,856 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Tongue in Currant-juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Cut off the root of the tongue.

  2. Split the tongue down not quite to the end.

Brown and stew

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and fry the tongue until browned.

  2. Add the currant juice or jelly, salt, pepper, and brown sugar.

  3. Stew the mixture together for three hours.

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. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Butter + sugartop 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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  5. Currant + peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Fresh tongue
Forms the main body of the stew, becoming tender during long, slow cooking.
Currant juice or currant jelly
Adds tartness and fruity flavour, and thickens the stew as it cooks down.
Butter
Fat for frying the tongue, helping it brown and develop savoury flavour.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the currant juice.

The step that matters

Browning the tongue in butter. Frying until well browned builds deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, which the long stew then carries into the sauce. Pale frying gives a flatter, less complex result.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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