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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, onions, turnip, carrots, peppercorns, and a brown flour thickener.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tails

  1. Divide the ox tails at the joints and rub them with suet.

  2. Soak in lukewarm water.

Simmer the soup

  1. Place the tails in a stew pan with onions, turnip, carrots, peppercorns, and soft water.

  2. Simmer for 2.5 hours.

  3. Remove the tails and cut them into small pieces.

Finish the soup

  1. Thicken the soup with browned flour mixed with top fat, then strain it into a clean stew pan.

  2. Add the pieces of meat back into the soup, bring to a boil, and skim off any fat.

  3. Adjust seasoning with more pepper if desired, and add catsup or port wine.

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. Turnip + carrottop 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. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 gelatinous body that enriches the broth during long simmering.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as they soften.
Browned flour
Thickens the soup, giving it body and a toasted, deeper flavor.
Top fat
Carries the browned flour smoothly into the soup and adds richness.
Carrots
Contribute sweetness and aroma to the broth during simmering.

The step that matters

Skim off any fat before serving. Fat rendered from the tails floats on the surface and can make the soup greasy. Removing it while the soup is brought to a boil keeps the broth clean-tasting.

Swap the onion

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

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

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