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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with lean beef, ox tails, onion, celery root, parsley, carrots, and water, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot 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 ↓

Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine beef, chopped ox tails, onion, celery root, parsley, and carrots in a large pot.

  2. Add 1 gallon of water and bring to a boil.

  3. Reduce heat and simmer for 4 hours until the liquid is reduced by half.

  4. Strain the soup.

Finish the soup

  1. Return the ox tail and chopped carrots to the pot.

  2. Brown the flour in fat in a separate pan.

  3. Add the browned flour to the soup to thicken.

  4. Optionally, add dumplings or green peas before serving.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  5. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 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

Flour
Browned in fat, it thickens the soup as it is stirred in.
Ox tails
Release collagen and flavor into the broth during long simmering, adding body.
Lean beef
Adds meaty flavor to the broth during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in fat. Flour that is cooked in fat before it goes into the soup thickens more evenly and avoids a raw, pasty taste. Stirring it in lumps-free while the soup is hot helps it disperse smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, celery, parsley, carrot, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, celery, parsley, carrot, 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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