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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox-tails, carrots, turnips, onions, celery, cloves, mace, broth, sugar, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox-tails

  1. Cut each ox-tail joint into 1-inch lengths using a small meat saw.

  2. Soak the pieces in water for 2 hours.

  3. Drain the ox-tail pieces and allow them to cool, then trim them neatly.

Make the broth

  1. In a stewpan, combine the ox-tails with carrots, turnips, onions, celery, cloves, and mace.

  2. Fill the stewpan with broth from the boiling stockpot and simmer until done.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the trimmed ox-tails in a soup pot.

  2. Clarify the broth used for boiling the ox-tails and strain it into a basin.

  3. Pour the clarified broth into the soup pot with the ox-tails and add boiled carrot and turnip pieces.

  4. Add a small lump of sugar and a pinch of mignonette pepper.

  5. Before serving, gently boil the soup.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and aroma to the broth.
Turnips
Contribute mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the broth.
Onions
Build savoury depth and aroma in the broth.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savoury flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Clarify the broth before combining. Straining and clarifying the broth removes cloudiness and fine particles, so the finished soup looks clear and tastes clean rather than muddy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, onion, celery, clove, olive, sugar):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, celery, clove, olive, sugar. 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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