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Ox-Tail Soup

A hearty broth made from ox tails, onions, carrots, turnip, flour, white pepper, and water, thickened with arrowroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ox-Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine ox tails, onions, carrots, turnip, flour, white pepper, and water in a large pot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil and simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Remove the ox tails from the pot.

  4. Cut the meat into small pieces.

  5. Return the bones to the pot.

  6. Boil the soup for another hour.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the soup.

  2. Rinse the arrowroot in a small amount of water.

  3. Add the rinsed arrowroot to the strained soup along with the cut meat.

  4. Let the soup boil for 15 minutes before serving.

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 + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Flour + arrowroottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together525 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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
Release gelatin and meaty flavor into the broth during long simmering.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the broth.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly as it cooks.
Arrowroot
Thickens the strained soup to a glossy, smooth consistency.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot. Arrowroot must be rinsed and added to the soup near the end, then brought to a boil. Starch thickens only when heated, and boiling too long or too hard can thin it again.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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