Skip to main content
Main

Ragout of Ox-Tail

A slow‑cooked ragout made with ox‑tail, butter, wine, herbs, and button onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Ragout of Ox-Tail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox-tail

  1. Parboil the ox-tail pieces for 20 minutes.

  2. Soak the pieces in cold water for 30 minutes.

Stew

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan and fry the floured ox-tail pieces until light-brown.

  2. Add white wine, salt, peppercorns, garlic, orange peel, calf's foot, and sweet herbs.

  3. Pour in boiling water, cover, and stew slowly for 4 hours.

  4. Brown the button onions in butter, then add to the ragout and cook for a few more minutes 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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. White wine + garlictop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,044 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tail
Slow stewing breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and the sauce rich.
Calf's foot
Adds gelatin, which thickens the stew and gives the sauce a silky body.
White wine
Adds acidity and aromatic flavor that balances the richness of the meat and fat.
Butter
Browns the floured meat and onions, building savory flavor through browning.

The step that matters

Stew slowly for 4 hours. Low, gentle heat over a long time lets collagen convert to gelatin so the meat becomes tender. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and cloud the sauce.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, white wine, clove, garlic, onion):

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, white wine, clove, garlic, onion. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes