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Ox Tails to Stew

A stew of ox tails simmered with onions, carrots, herbs, and mustard, served with buttered vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Ox Tails to Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tails

  1. Scald or parboil the ox tails.

  2. In a stew pan, melt the butter and brown the tails to prevent burning.

Stew and season

  1. Add enough broth or water to cover the tails and stew slowly until tender.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, cayenne, chopped parsley, and mustard.

  3. Thicken the gravy with browned flour.

Cook the vegetables and serve

  1. In a separate pot, boil the chopped carrots and turnips.

  2. Stew the boiled carrots and turnips in melted butter.

  3. Serve the stewed ox tails with the buttered vegetables.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Provide the meat and collagen that become tender and give the stew its body during slow cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns the tails to build flavor before stewing.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the tails and vegetables instead of staying watery.
Onions
Add sweetness and savory depth as they soften into the broth.
Carrots
Add natural sweetness and body to the stew and the buttered vegetables.

The step that matters

Brown the tails in butter before stewing. Browning creates savory, roasted flavors through the Maillard reaction. Tails that are pale or crowded in the pan will steam instead, producing a flatter, less colorful gravy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley, mustard, flour, carrot, thyme):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, mustard, flour, carrot, thyme. 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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