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French Ox Tail or Mock Turtle Soup

A hearty soup made with ham, onions, butter, ox tail, tomatoes, spices, lemon, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

French Ox Tail or Mock Turtle Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a pot, combine ham, onions, butter, and ox tail.

  2. Add enough hot water to cover the ingredients and boil for one hour.

  3. Add tomatoes, spices in a bag, and the skin of one lemon; boil well.

Serve

  1. Mash the hard-boiled egg and place it in the bottom of your serving tureen.

  2. Pour the soup over the egg just before serving.

  3. Add ⅓ cup of sherry and sliced lemon just before serving.

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. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Ham + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tail
Gives the soup a rich, meaty body as it simmers for a long time.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty depth to the broth during simmering.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and fruity sweetness that rounds out the broth.
Hard-boiled egg
Mashed into the tureen, it adds body and a mild, rich texture to the soup.
Sherry
Adds acidity and a fragrant, nutty aroma when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the sherry and lemon just before serving. Sherry's aromatic compounds and the lemon's bright acidity are volatile and fade with prolonged heat, so they are added at the end to keep the flavour fresh.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, onion, butter, tomato, egg, sherry):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Pineapplefits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, onion, butter, tomato, egg, sherry. 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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