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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) · 12 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

Brown and simmer

  1. Fry the ox tails in butter until browned on both sides.

  2. Place the browned ox tails 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 hot water and stir.

  4. Add the onion mixture to the soup kettle, cover, and simmer for 4 hours.

  5. After 2 hours, add the vegetables, bay leaves, and cloves.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a skillet, heat 1 tablespoon browned flour with 2 tablespoons fat from the soup.

  2. Add a few spoonfuls of soup to the skillet, stir, and boil for 1 minute.

  3. Stir the mixture back into the soup and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then 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

Ox tails
Release gelatin and meaty flavor into the broth during long simmering.
Butter
Carries browning for flavor and enriches the fat used to fry the ox tails and onions.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth to the broth as they cook down.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup as the starch cooks in the fat and soup liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the soup. Cooking the flour in fat first and then adding soup liquid slowly, while stirring, prevents lumps and lets the soup thicken smoothly.

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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