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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made by simmering ox tails with onion, herbs, and spices in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and cut the ox tails into joints.

  2. Chop the onion and fry it in hot beef drippings until slightly browned.

  3. Move the onion to one side of the pan and brown half of the ox tails.

Make the soup

  1. Transfer the fried onions and ox tails to a soup kettle and cover with 4 quarts of cold water.

  2. Place the cloves, peppercorns, and herbs in a small piece of cheesecloth and add to the soup.

  3. Add salt and simmer for 3 to 4 hours, or until the meat separates from the bone and is tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Select the nicest joints to serve with the soup.

  2. Skim off the fat, adjust seasoning with more salt and pepper if needed, strain, and serve very hot.

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. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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-rich bone that give the soup its body and flavour.
Beef drippings
Add fat for frying the onion and ox tails, building a browned, savoury base.
Onion
Browns in the drippings to add sweetness and aroma to the broth.
Mixed herbs
Add aromatic flavour to the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer until the meat is tender. Long, gentle simmering lets collagen in the connective tissue and bone break down into gelatin, which makes the meat tender and the broth richer. Boiling hard can make the broth cloudy and toughen the meat.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, beef):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, beef. 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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