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Boiled Beef Tongue

A boiled beef tongue cooked with bait, pepper, salt, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Beef Tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the tongue

  1. Wash the fresh tongue.

  2. Cover it with water in a pot and add the pint of bait and the small red pepper.

  3. Keep adding water as it evaporates to keep the tongue nearly covered until it can be easily pierced with a fork.

  4. Remove the tongue from the pot.

  5. Peel off the skin if you want to use it soon. Otherwise, let it cool without peeling.

Finish in vinegar and sugar

  1. Soak salt tongues overnight. Omit the salt when boiling.

  2. After peeling, place the tongue in a saucepan with 1 cup of water, ½ cup of vinegar, and 4 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Cook until the liquid evaporates.

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. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Beef + fishtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together226 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Fish + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,948 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef tongue
Is the main meat, becoming tender through long, gentle simmering.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet glaze-like liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the liquid reduce into a sticky coating on the tongue.

The step that matters

Keep the tongue nearly covered while boiling. Meat exposed above the liquid cooks unevenly and dries out, so topping up with water as it evaporates keeps the tongue moist and tender until a fork pierces it easily.

“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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