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Oxtail Soup

A hearty soup made with oxtail, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, peppercorns or cayenne, salt, and optional tomato.

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 ↓

Oxtail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the sliced onion in butter or drippings until brown.

  2. Add the oxtail joints and brown them on all sides.

  3. Transfer the contents to a soup kettle.

  4. Add the sliced carrot, celery, parsley, peppercorns or cayenne, and salt.

  5. Cover with cold water and simmer slowly until the meat falls from the bones.

  6. If desired, add 1 cup of strained tomato.

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. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 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

Oxtail joints
Provide meat and collagen that break down into rich body during slow simmering.
Onion
Browning in fat builds deep, savoury flavour that carries into the broth.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and aromatic depth to the broth.
Celery
Contributes aromatic savoury flavour to the broth.
Strained tomato
Adds acidity and a tangy, rounded flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer slowly until the meat falls from the bones. A gentle simmer lets collagen in the oxtail slowly convert to gelatin, giving body to the broth and tender meat. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can cloud the broth.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, carrot, celery, parsley):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, carrot, celery, parsley. 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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