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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, butter, onion, garlic, carrot, turnip, bay leaf, and water or stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox-tails

  1. Wash and wipe the ox-tails, then cut them into pieces about 1 inch long.

  2. Heat the butter in a frying pan.

  3. Add the ox-tails and stir until browned.

Simmer and serve

  1. Remove the ox-tails and place them in a soup kettle with the other ingredients.

  2. Simmer for about 2 hours.

  3. Remove the vegetables, add salt and pepper, and 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 + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tails
Provide rich meat and gelatin that give the soup body and flavor during long simmering.
Butter
Carries heat for browning the ox-tails, adding roasted, savory flavor to the soup.
Onion
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth as it cooks.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and color to the broth during simmering.
Turnip
Adds mild, slightly sweet vegetable flavor to the broth during simmering.

The step that matters

Browning the ox-tails. Stirring until well browned develops deeper flavors through the Maillard reaction. Pale meat added to the kettle yields a flatter, less savory broth, so the pieces need real color before simmering.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, clove, carrot, turnip, 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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