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Ox Tail Soup, Thick

A thick soup made with ox tails, vegetables, ham, stock, herbs, and thickened with flour and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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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 ↓

Ox Tail Soup, Thick

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the meat and vegetables

  1. Wash and cut the ox tails into 1-inch pieces, dividing the thick pieces into four.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and fry the ox tails until browned.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables and diced ham to the pan and fry for a few minutes.

  4. Pour in 1 quart of water and stir over high heat for 15 minutes.

Simmer the soup

  1. Add 2 quarts of stock, sweet herbs, bay leaf, salt, peppercorns, cloves, and sugar.

  2. Simmer gently until the meat is tender and easily separates from the bones.

  3. Remove the meat, strain the soup, and skim off the fat.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a saucepan, brown the fat and mix in the flour to create a smooth paste.

  2. Thicken the soup with the flour mixture and stir in the mushroom ketchup.

  3. Add the pieces of tail back to the soup and simmer for an additional 15 minutes.

  4. Serve hot with fresh rolls.

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Provide the meat and gelatin-rich body that flavours the broth as they cook.
Fresh butter
Carries the initial frying and browns the ox tails for deeper flavour.
Fine flour
Thickens the soup when browned in fat and stirred in as a paste.
Onions
Break down during frying and simmering to add sweetness and savoury depth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the stock as they soften during simmering.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury, umami flavour to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Making the flour thickening. Flour must be cooked in the fat until smooth and then stirred into the hot soup; otherwise it clumps and stays starchy instead of thickening evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, turnip, celery, ham, clove, sugar. 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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