Skip to main content
Main

Oxtail Soup

A hearty soup made with oxtails, butter, onion, garlic, turnip, carrot, celery, bay leaf, salt, pepper, port wine, and corn starch.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Oxtail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oxtails

  1. Wash and wipe the oxtails, then cut them into pieces.

  2. Heat the butter in a pan until hot, then add the oxtail pieces and stir until browned.

Simmer the soup

  1. Transfer the browned oxtails to a soup kettle and add the chopped vegetables.

  2. Simmer for four hours, then remove the vegetables.

  3. Mix the corn starch with a little water, then stir it into the soup.

  4. Finally, stir in the port wine.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Oxtails
Provide the meat and gelatin that give the soup its body and richness.
Butter
Browns the oxtail pieces, adding roasted flavour before simmering.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and depth of flavour to the finished soup.
Corn starch
Thickens the soup as it is stirred in and comes to heat.

The step that matters

Browning the oxtail pieces. Browning in hot butter creates Maillard flavour compounds that carry into the broth. Pale, steamed pieces make a flatter soup, so the meat should be well coloured on all sides before it goes into the kettle.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, clove, turnip, carrot, celery, pepper, port wine):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, clove, turnip, carrot, celery, pepper, port wine. 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.

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCream of Corn SoupCream of Corn Soup50 recipes