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Beef Tongue Boasted

Roasted beef tongue basted with butter and served with a port wine reduction.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and port wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,499 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Beef Tongue Boasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Scald the tongue to remove the skin.

  2. Cut off the root and trim the tongue to stand well on a dish.

  3. Insert a thin skewer through the tongue and stick a few cloves where the root was cut off.

  4. Tie the tongue on a spit and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Roast and make the sauce

  1. Baste with butter while roasting until done.

  2. In a saucepan, reduce ½ cup port wine to ⅓ cup.

  3. Add 5-6 tablespoons of espagnole sauce and bring to a boil.

  4. Stir in 2 ounces of butter and a little lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Place the tongue on a dish and pour the sauce around it.

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 + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Beef + port winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together626 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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
Forms the main meat; its fat and connective tissue keep the slices moist and tender during roasting.
Port wine
Reduced to concentrate its sweetness and fruity flavour into the sauce.
Espagnole sauce
Brown sauce base that gives the finished sauce body and savoury depth.
Butter
Basting fat that promotes browning on the surface and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Reducing the port wine. Reducing concentrates the wine's sugars and flavour while evaporating alcohol. Cooking it too briefly leaves the sauce thin and harsh, and too long can make it overly sticky or bitter.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, butter, port wine, sauce):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, butter, port wine, sauce. 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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