Skip to main content
Main

Tongue in Jelly

A chilled aspic made with cooked tongue, hard‑boiled eggs, and gelatin set in clear stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and watercress work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 983 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tongue in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jelly

  1. Season the clear stock with black pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Add gelatine to the stock and boil together.

  3. Set the mixture aside to cool.

Layer and set

  1. Grease a round tin with butter or oil.

  2. Pour some jelly into the tin, then add a layer of sliced cooked tongue.

  3. Add more jelly and some slices of hard-boiled egg.

  4. Repeat the layers until the mould is full.

  5. Leave it to set for 12 hours in the refrigerator.

Serve

  1. Turn out the jelly and serve garnished with watercress or parsley.

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 + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Butter + watercresstop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together842 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the stock into a firm jelly that holds the layers in shape.
Clear stock
Forms the liquid base that becomes the savoury jelly around the layers.
Cooked tongue
Provides the meat layers, adding savoury flavour and substance to each slice.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds firm, mild layers that contrast in texture with the jelly and meat.

The step that matters

Cool the stock before layering. Gelatine must be fully dissolved and the stock cooled so it thickens into a firm layer rather than melting or mixing into the next layer. Each layer needs to be set enough to hold its position when the next jelly is poured over it.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes