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Potted Ox Tail

A stew of ox tail simmered with bacon, onion, carrots, celery, cloves, bay leaf, and a brown flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

Potted Ox Tail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Place the ox tail pieces in a large casserole.

  2. In a frying pan, cook the bacon until crispy.

  3. Add the sliced onion and sugar to the pan, and brown well.

  4. Pour the boiling water into the pan, boil briefly, and strain into the casserole.

  5. Add the carrot, celery, cloves, and bay leaf to the casserole.

Simmer the meat

  1. Cover and simmer slowly for 2 hours.

  2. Add the salt and white wine halfway through cooking.

  3. Once the meat is tender, strain the stock.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a separate pan, melt the butter and brown the flour.

  2. Gradually add the strained stock, cooking until smooth.

  3. Pour the sauce over the meat in the casserole, heat together, and serve.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 collagen that become tender and give the stock body during slow simmering.
Flour
Browned in butter and mixed with stock, it thickens the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour for browning, adding a nutty flavour to the sauce base.
Bacon
Its rendered fat and browned bits add savoury depth to the stock.
Onion
Browned with sugar, it adds sweetness and deepens the colour and flavour of the stock.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the braising liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Cooking the flour long enough to lose its raw taste, but stopping before it darkens too much, sets the flavour and thickening power of the sauce. Adding stock gradually while stirring prevents lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, carrot, celery, clove, white wine, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, carrot, celery, clove, white wine, butter, 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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