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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, butter, onions, celery root, carrots, parsley, leek, bay leaves, cloves, and browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and base

  1. Fry the oxtails in butter until browned on both sides.

  2. Place the oxtails in a soup kettle with 1 gallon of water and bring to a boil.

  3. Fry the onions in the same butter until light brown, then add ½ cup of hot water and stir.

  4. Add the onion mixture to the soup kettle and cover.

Simmer the soup

  1. Cook slowly for 4 hours, adding the vegetables, bay leaves, and cloves after 2 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a skillet, heat the browned flour and fat, then add a few spoonfuls of soup and stir. Boil for 1 minute, then stir back into the soup and cook for 30 minutes.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve with a piece of ox tail in each bowl.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 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

Oxtails (in the method)
Release gelatin and meaty flavor into the broth during long, slow cooking.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth when fried to light brown before simmering.
Browned flour
Thickens the broth as its starch swells when heated with fat and soup.
Butter
Browns the meat and onions, adding fat and toasted, rich flavor.

The step that matters

Adding the browned flour and fat. Flour must be cooked in fat and whisked into hot liquid smoothly; added directly or unevenly it forms lumps, and boiling it fully removes raw starch taste and lets it thicken properly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, celery, carrot, parsley, leek, clove, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, celery, carrot, parsley, leek, clove, 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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