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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, butter, flour, onion, carrot, celery, garlic, bay leaf, parsley, peppercorns, mushroom ketchup, port, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Divide the butter into two portions; put half in a large pan and half in a frying pan.

  2. Fry the onion slowly in the large pan until light brown.

  3. Cut the ox tails into joints, flour them, and fry quickly in the hot frying pan.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the remaining flour smoothly with 1 cup of cold water, then pour it into the pan with the browned onion and stock.

  2. Stir well until it boils, then lift the pieces of tail into the thickened soup.

  3. Add the vegetables and seasonings, salt to taste, cover the pan, and simmer slowly for 3 hours.

  4. Pour the soup through a sieve, return it to the pan, and pick off the best of the meat to add back into the soup.

  5. Bring to a boil, then add the wine and mushroom catsup.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue, giving the soup rich body and tender meat.
Butter
Carries flavor during frying and adds richness to the soup.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, body-rich soup and helps the tails brown.
Spanish onion
Browning slowly builds sweet, deep savory flavor that underpins the soup.
Port or claret
Adds acidity and fruity depth that balances the rich meat and stock.

The step that matters

Mix the flour with cold water before adding it to the pan. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps, because starch granules swell unevenly on contact. Blending it smoothly into cold water first lets it disperse and thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, carrot, celery, clove, parsley, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, carrot, celery, clove, parsley, mushroom. 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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