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Braised Tongue

Braised ox tongue cooked slowly in butter and flour, finished with a thickened gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Braised Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the tongue

  1. Boil the pickled ox tongue for 2 hours, then skin it.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and brown the tongue in it along with the flour.

  3. Add enough water to cover the tongue, cover the pan, and steam for another 2 hours or until very soft.

Serve

  1. Serve with the thickened 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Ox tongue
Main protein; long cooking with moist heat makes it very tender.
Butter
Fat that browns the tongue and adds richness to the dish.
Flour
Browns with the butter and thickens the cooking liquid into gravy.

The step that matters

Steam until very soft. The tongue needs a long, covered simmer or steam so connective tissue breaks down. Stopping early leaves it tough, and the gravy will not thicken properly without the cooking juices.

“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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