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Ox-cheek Soup

A hearty soup made by stewing ox cheeks with vegetables, then thickening with flour and broth, finished with sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Ox-cheek Soup

Why it works: Turnip and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,046 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ox-cheek Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox cheeks

  1. Blanch and wash the ox cheeks, cut off the beard, and remove all bones.

  2. Chop the bones and cut the flesh into medium-sized pieces, leaving the cheek part whole.

Make the soup

  1. Place everything in a stewpan with water, salt, peppercorns, carrots, turnips, leek, celery, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and burnt onion.

  2. Stew for six hours, skimming regularly.

  3. Remove the cheek meat and strain the broth through a sieve into another stewpan.

  4. Mix flour with cold broth and pour into the strained broth, stirring until boiling.

  5. Simmer until tender, adding finely cut celery and sherry.

Serve

  1. Cut the meat into small square slices, keep warm, and serve over the soup.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Turnip + leektop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth, body-rich soup when stirred in and brought to a boil.
Ox cheeks
Provide rich, gelatinous meat that softens and enriches the broth during long stewing.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the broth. Flour mixed with cold liquid before adding to hot broth disperses evenly; added dry or to hot liquid it forms lumps that are hard to smooth out.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, leek, celery, parsley, thyme, 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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