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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox-tail, lean beef, carrots, onions, thyme, parsley, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fry the ox-tail joints in good dripping until browned.

  2. In the same dripping, fry the sliced onions and carrots until done.

  3. Tie the thyme and parsley in a lace bag and add to a soup pot with 4 quarts of water.

Simmer and thicken

  1. Add the fried ox-tail and the strips of lean beef to the pot.

  2. Grate 2 carrots over the mixture, season with pepper and coarse sea salt, and boil slowly for 4 hours.

  3. Strain the soup and thicken with brown flour moistened with cold water, then boil for an additional 15 minutes.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ox-tail
Browned joints and slow simmering release gelatin and meaty flavour into the broth.
Lean beef
Adds meaty flavour and body to the broth during the long simmer.
Onions
Frying until done builds sweet, savoury depth that flavours the soup.
Carrots
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften and release sugars into the broth.
Brown flour
Starch thickens the strained broth as it boils, giving it body.

The step that matters

Thicken with moistened flour. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water before adding, otherwise it forms lumps that do not dissolve. Boiling then fully cooks the starch so the soup thickens without a raw floury taste.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, thyme, parsley, beef, pepper, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, thyme, parsley, beef, pepper, 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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