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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, onions, carrots, turnips, parsley, peppercorns, mushroom ketchup, butter, flour, and toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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. Rub the ox tails with coarse sea salt and soak them in warm water.

  2. In a large pot, combine the onions, parsley, carrots, turnips, and peppercorns.

  3. Add the soaked ox tails and pour in 3 quarts of water.

Simmer and strain

  1. Cover the pot and simmer gently for about 3 hours, adding fresh hot coals as needed.

  2. Skim the soup carefully.

  3. When the meat is tender and falls from the bones, strain the soup into another pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the mushroom ketchup.

  2. Mix the butter with flour until smooth, then add to the soup.

  3. Thicken the soup with the pulp of the fried onions.

  4. Bring the soup to a boil.

  5. Serve the soup in a tureen with small squares of toasted bread.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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 collagen that enrich the broth and become tender during long simmering.
Onion pulp
Thickens the soup and adds body and sweetness from the fried onions.
Butter and flour
Form a roux-style paste that thickens the soup and gives it a smooth, rich body.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds savory depth and umami to the broth.

The step that matters

Mix the butter with flour until smooth. Lumps of flour won't disperse evenly in hot liquid. Working the butter and flour into a smooth paste first lets it thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, carrot, turnip, mushroom, ketchup, butter, 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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