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Pickled-tongue, Sour-sweet Sauce

Pickled tongues are cured with salt, then cured in souse, and served with a piquant sauce, currant jelly, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,180 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Pickled-tongue, Sour-sweet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the tongues

  1. Trim the tongues.

  2. Rub the tongues with fine salt until softened.

  3. Place the tongues on a baking sheet with a weight on top.

  4. Layer the tongues in a wooden tub or wedgewood pan.

  5. Cover the tongues with cooked and cooled souse.

  6. Cover the vessel with a cloth.

  7. Keep it in a cool place.

  8. Turn the tongues every second day.

Prepare and serve

  1. Drain one tongue.

  2. Soak the tongue in water for 3 hours.

  3. Remove the skin.

  4. Glaze the tongue with a paste brush.

  5. Dish it up.

  6. Mask the tongue with piquant sauce.

  7. Finish with currant jelly and small raisins.

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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  2. Sauce + raisintop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + curranttop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together628 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Tongues
Salt and souse cure firm and preserve the meat, giving it its pickled flavour and texture.
Fine salt
Draws out moisture and softens the muscle while it begins to cure the meat.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and body to the sour-sweet sauce that finishes the dish.
Small raisins
Add chewy sweetness that balances the sharpness of the piquant sauce.

The step that matters

Turn the tongues every second day. Turning keeps the curing liquid in contact with every surface, so the cure penetrates evenly instead of leaving pale or unevenly salted patches.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, raisin):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, raisin. 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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