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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, ham, vegetables, and seasonings, simmered for hours and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the ox-tails into pieces at the joints and wash them.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the ox-tails.

  3. Slice the vegetables and add them along with the herbs.

  4. Pour in ½ cup of water and stir over high heat until juices are released.

Make the soup

  1. Fill the stewpan with water, bring to a boil, and add the salt.

  2. Skim the surface and simmer gently for 4 hours until the tails are tender.

  3. Remove the tails, skim and strain the soup.

  4. Thicken the soup with flour and add the catsup and port wine.

  5. Return the tails to the pot, simmer for 5 minutes, and serve.

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 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 meat and gelatin that give the soup body and a rich mouthfeel as they simmer.
Butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps brown the tails at the start.
Onions
Release sugars and aromatic compounds that build the savoury base of the broth.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and fruity depth to the finished soup.
Flour (in the method)
Thickens the soup by swelling with liquid as it heats.

The step that matters

Skim the surface and simmer gently. Boiling hard emulsifies fat and cloudies the broth, and skimming removes impurities that would make the soup greasy and murky. A gentle simmer lets the tails become tender without breaking apart.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, butter, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, pepper. 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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