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Spiced Beef Tongue

A pickled and baked beef tongue seasoned with brown sugar, saltpetre, cloves, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Spiced Beef Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cure the tongue

  1. Mix brown sugar, saltpetre, and ground cloves, then rub the mixture into the tongue.

  2. Prepare a brine with salt and water, submerge the tongue in the brine and cover.

  3. Pickle for two weeks.

Prepare for baking

  1. Wash the tongue and dry it with a cloth.

  2. Roll out a thin paste of flour and water and smear the paste over the tongue.

  3. Place the tongue in a pan.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C), basting with lard and hot water.

  2. When done, scrape off the paste and remove the skin.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Clove + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 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

Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps flavour the cure on the surface of the tongue.
Saltpetre
Gives the cured meat its characteristic pink colour during the long pickling.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the tongue during the brine cure.
Ground cloves
Adds warm aromatic flavour to the cure.
Flour
Forms a protective paste that shields the tongue from drying out during baking.

The step that matters

Pickle for two weeks. The brine and cure must fully penetrate the thick tongue for the meat to be seasoned and preserved evenly. Too short a cure leaves the centre under-seasoned and less stable, so the full pickling time matters.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, flour):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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