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Braised Tongue with Aspic Jelly

Braised tongue served cold with a gelatinous aspic made from its cooking liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,108 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Braised Tongue with Aspic Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the tongue

  1. Boil the tongue until tender.

  2. In a stewpan, add the tongue, onions, celery, cloves, salt, and pepper.

  3. Cover with the liquor from boiling the tongue.

  4. Add brandy, sugar, mace, thyme, and parsley.

  5. Simmer gently for two hours.

Make the aspic and serve

  1. Remove the tongue and strain the cooking liquid.

  2. Soak gelatine in cold water, then heat and pour over the tongue.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tongue
Main meat that becomes tender through boiling and slow simmering in the braising liquid.
Gelatine
Sets the strained cooking liquid into a firm aspic that holds the tongue when cold.
Brandy
Adds aroma and depth of flavour to the braising liquid.
Onions
Sweetness and savoury flavour that build the base of the braising liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for two hours. A gentle simmer keeps the tongue tender without toughening its proteins, while a hard boil can make the meat tough and cloud the liquid. Gentle heat also lets the gelatine-rich liquid stay clear enough to set well as aspic.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, clove, pepper, brandy, sugar, thyme):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, clove, pepper, brandy, sugar, thyme. 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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