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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, salt pork, vegetables, and catsup, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the ox-tails at the joints.

  2. Slice the vegetables.

  3. Chop the salt pork finely.

Make the soup

  1. Fry the chopped salt pork in a pot.

  2. Brown the onions in the fat.

  3. Add the ox-tails to the pot.

  4. Fry the ox-tails for 5 minutes.

  5. Cut each joint to the bone.

  6. Transfer everything to a soup kettle.

  7. Pour in the boiling water.

  8. Simmer slowly for 4 hours until the tails are tender.

  9. Add the remaining vegetables.

  10. Add the cloves stuck into a piece of onion.

  11. Add salt and pepper to taste.

  12. Add the catsup.

  13. Strain the soup through a fine sieve.

  14. Return the ox-tails to the pot.

Serve

  1. Serve one joint in each plate.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 broth as they simmer until tender.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour when fried, seasoning the base of the soup.
Onions
Browning in the fat builds sweetness and depth of flavour in the broth.
Catsup
Adds tomato-based acidity and sweetness that rounds out the soup's flavour.

The step that matters

Brown the onions in the fat. Browning caramelises the onion sugars and creates savoury flavour compounds. Pale onions give a flat, less complex broth, so cook until golden before adding liquid.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, celery, carrot, turnip, 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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