Name: Ox-tail Soup
Ingredients: 2 ox-tails; 1 onion; 1 carrot; a few cloves; 1 blade of mace; 1 stick of cinnamon; 2 quarts stock; coarse sea salt; black pepper

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Separate the ox-tails at the joints.
Boil the ox-tails with the onion, carrot, cloves, mace, and cinnamon for 2 hours.
Strain the liquid into a soup kettle.
Remove the tails from the vegetables.
Spice the tails.
Add the tails to the liquid.
Add 2 quarts of stock, salt, and pepper.
Bring to a boil.
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.

Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,189 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,873 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,555 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together981 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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 gelatin that give the soup its body and richness.
Stock: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.
Onion: Adds savoury sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as it simmers.
Carrot: Contributes subtle sweetness and body to the broth as it simmers.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, clove, cinnamon, pepper):

Allspicefits better
Cardamomfits better
Nutmegfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, clove, cinnamon, pepper. 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.