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Oxtail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tail, vegetables, and spices, simmered for hours.

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

Oxtail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cut up the ox tail and fry it in butter.

  2. Add the onion, brown flour, vegetables, and cloves.

  3. Pour in the water and bring to a boil.

  4. Let it simmer for 4 to 5 hours, then strain the soup.

Serve

  1. Place pieces of ox tail in a tureen with sliced eggs, lemon, parsley, and sherry.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 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 tail
Provides the meat and gelatin that give the soup its body and richness.
Brown flour
Browned in the fat, it thickens the soup and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Butter
Fat for frying the ox tail, adding browned flavour and richness.
Carrots
Release sweetness and earthy flavour into the broth during long simmering.
Sherry
Adds acidity and a sweet, aromatic note to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Let it simmer for 4 to 5 hours, then strain the soup.. A long, gentle simmer below a boil slowly draws collagen from the tail into gelatin, giving body, while keeping the broth clear. Boiling hard makes it cloudy and greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, clove, carrot, turnip, egg, sherry):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, clove, carrot, turnip, egg, sherry. 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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