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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, vegetables, and herbs simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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

  1. Cut the ox-tails at the joints into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Slice the vegetables and mince the pork.

  3. Cut each joint to the bone to allow the juice to escape during boiling.

Brown and simmer

  1. In a stewpan, heat the pork until hot, then add the onion.

  2. Fry until the onion begins to color, then add the ox-tails.

  3. Fry the tails for 5 to 8 minutes, browning on all sides.

  4. Transfer everything to a soup kettle and add the boiling water.

  5. Simmer gently for about 4 hours.

  6. Add the remaining vegetables and the cloves stuck into a piece of onion.

  7. Season with salt and pepper.

  8. Once the vegetables are cooked, strain the soup through a fine strainer.

Serve

  1. Serve 1 joint and 2 cups of soup for each person.

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. Carrot + celerytop 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tails
Release gelatin and rich meaty flavor into the broth during long simmering.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory depth that carries flavor through the soup.
Onion
Browns in the fat to build sweetness and aroma as the base of the soup.
Carrots
Contribute natural sweetness and body to the broth as they soften.

The step that matters

Browning the ox-tails. Frying the tails until well browned on all sides creates Maillard flavors that the long simmer cannot produce, giving the broth depth and color.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, carrot, celery, parsley, clove, pepper):

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

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