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Ox Tail Soup

A soup made from ox tails simmered for hours, thickened with cream and ketchup, served with tail pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and cream work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 279 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tails

  1. Clean and cut the ox tails into pieces.

Simmer and strain

  1. Boil the tails quietly in water for several hours.

  2. Add the crust of bread and salt to the pot.

  3. Once tender, strain the liquid and remove the fat.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the soup with a little cream and stir in the ketchup.

  2. Serve the soup with the tails cut into pieces.

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. Ketchup + creamtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Bread + ketchuptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together813 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Collagen slowly breaks down into gelatin during long simmering, giving the soup body and richness.
Bread crust
Its starch helps thicken the broth slightly.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder mouthfeel to the soup.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that balance the savory broth.

The step that matters

Keep the soup at a gentle simmer. A quiet simmer lets collagen in the tails break down slowly into gelatin, giving body, while a hard boil can cloud the broth and toughen the meat.

“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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