Skip to main content
Main

Potted Tongue

A preserved tongue dish made by boiling, mincing, seasoning, and packing in pots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Boil the tongue until tender.

  2. Trim off the skin and rind.

  3. Weigh the meat.

  4. Mince it very small.

Make and pot

  1. Pound the minced meat with butter, nutmeg, cloves, and Cayenne pepper until well combined.

  2. Pack the mixture into pots for storage.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tongue
Forms the main body of the potted meat, giving it its substance and texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the pounded meat become smooth and spreadable.

The step that matters

Pounding the minced meat with butter. Pounding breaks the minced meat into fine fibres and blends in the butter, so the spices distribute evenly and the texture turns smooth rather than grainy or streaky.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

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

You might also like

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