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Oxtail Soup,

A thickened oxtail soup made with butter, flour, red currant jelly, anchovy vinegar, Madeira, lime juice, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Oxtail Soup,

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strain the soup, saving all the oxtail joints, and let it sit in a bowl.

  2. Remove the meat from the oxtail, pound it, and pass the paste through a sieve.

  3. Skim the fat off the bowl of soup.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter, stir in the flour, and gradually add the soup and paste until fully combined.

  2. Bring the puree to a boil until thickened.

  3. Add the red currant jelly, anchovy vinegar, and Madeira, stirring vigorously for one minute 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. Red currant + limetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + anchovytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,697 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Oxtail joints
Provide the meat and body that give the soup its rich flavour and thickness.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the roux base that thickens the soup.
Flour
Forms a roux with the butter that thickens the soup as it cooks.
Red currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity tang that balances the savoury broth.
Madeira
Adds a rich, aromatic sweetness and depth to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boiling the puree after adding the flour-thickened base. Flour only thickens fully once it has been cooked and brought to a boil, so the puree should be boiled until it visibly thickens before the wine and jelly are added.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, red currant, anchovy, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, red currant, anchovy, vinegar, sugar. 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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