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Stewed Ox-tail

A slow‑cooked stew of ox‑tail with onion, vegetables, herbs, and a thickened gravy.

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 ↓

Stewed Ox-tail

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oxtail

  1. Cut the ox-tail into joints and scald in boiling water.

  2. Dry the joints and dip them in flour.

  3. Fry in hot dripping until golden brown.

Stew

  1. Cover with stock, bring to a boil, and skim.

  2. Add vegetables, mace, herbs, salt, and pepper.

  3. Simmer gently for three hours or until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with 2 teaspoons of flour mixed with a little cold water.

  2. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tail
Provides the meat and collagen-rich body that becomes tender during long gentle simmering.
Flour
Dusting helps the joints brown, and mixed with water it thickens the gravy.
Butter or dripping
Fat for frying that browns the floured joints and carries flavour.
Stock or water
Liquid that cooks the joints and forms the base of the gravy.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness to the stewing liquid as it softens.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for three hours. A gentle simmer breaks down the connective tissue in oxtail slowly, making the meat tender. A hard boil toughens the meat and makes the liquid cloudy.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, onion, carrot, turnip, butter, flour. 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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