Skip to main content
Main

Thick Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, onions, carrots, turnips, herbs, butter, flour, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Thick Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cut the ox-tails into pieces.

  2. Place them in a saucepan with 2 quarts of water.

  3. Simmer until well done.

  4. Mix butter and flour in a bowl.

  5. Fry sliced onions in butter until golden.

  6. Add the fried onions to the butter-flour mixture.

  7. Add the herbs.

Make the soup

  1. Boil everything together for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the soup through a fine sieve.

  3. Cook carrots separately until tender.

  4. Cook turnips separately until tender.

  5. Add the cooked vegetables to the soup.

  6. Mix well.

  7. If needed, adjust the soup with good stock.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 meaty flavour into the water as they simmer, giving the soup body.
Butter
Carries flavour from the fried onions and, with flour, forms the base that thickens the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter into a roux.
Onions
Browning in butter adds sweetness and savoury depth to the soup.
Carrots
Add sweetness and soft texture to the finished soup.
Turnips
Add a mild, slightly sharp earthy flavour and soft texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the butter-flour mixture to the soup. Flour thickens only when its starch is cooked and dispersed. Stirring the flour mixture into hot liquid gradually and keeping it moving prevents lumps, and the soup must then boil long enough for the starch to thicken fully.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More ox tail soup recipes

Clear 5 See all 157 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes