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Ox-tail Soup

A soup made with ox tails, onions, carrots, celery, parsley, and herbs, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox-tails

  1. Wash the ox-tails and joint them, cracking the bones if possible.

Make the soup

  1. In a stew pan, heat the minced pork, then add the sliced onion and brown it.

  2. Fry the ox-tails in the same fat for a short time.

  3. Place the ox-tails in a soup kettle with the water and simmer for 4 hours.

  4. Add the sliced vegetables and cook until they are very tender.

  5. Strain the soup.

  6. Reserve some of the ox-tail joints for serving.

Chill and serve

  1. Refrigerate the soup overnight.

  2. Remove the fat from the soup the next day.

  3. Season the soup with salt, pepper, and ketchup or Worcestershire sauce as preferred.

  4. Return the reserved ox-tail joints to the soup.

  5. Heat the soup when ready to 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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tails
Long simmering breaks down connective tissue and gives the soup body and rich flavor.
Minced pork
Its fat is used to brown the onion and ox-tails, adding savory depth.
Onion
Browning in the pork fat builds sweet, savory flavor in the base.
Carrots
Add sweetness and color as they soften during the long simmer.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savory flavor to the broth as it cooks.

The step that matters

Remove the fat from the soup the next day. Fat from the ox-tails and pork rises and solidifies when the soup is chilled overnight. Skimming it off before reheating keeps the broth clean-tasting and less greasy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, celery, parsley, pork, clove, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, celery, parsley, pork, clove, 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.

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