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Haricot Ox Tail

A slow‑cooked ox tail stew with onions, cloves, ginger, root vegetables, and a flour thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Haricot Ox Tail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stew

  1. Fry the sliced onion in butter until soft.

  2. Add the chopped ox tail, cloves, ginger, pepper, and salt.

  3. Simmer for 1 hour.

Finish and thicken

  1. Add the sliced turnips and carrots.

  2. Stew for another 1.5 hours.

  3. Thicken the stew with flour.

  4. If the color is too light, add a few drops of browning sauce.

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 + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Ginger + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,377 recipes

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

  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

Ox tail
Provides meat and collagen that break down during long simmering, giving body and richness.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid as it cooks, giving it a looser, more coating texture.
Butter
Fat for frying the onion, adding richness and helping it soften and brown lightly.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stew as they soften during simmering.
Turnips
Soften during stewing and add mild sweetness and earthy flavor to the broth.

The step that matters

Thicken the stew with flour. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump. Mixing it smoothly first, or whisking it into a little cold liquid before adding, helps it thicken evenly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, clove, ginger, pepper, turnip, carrot, flour. 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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