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To Boil Ox Cheek

A boiled ox cheek served with boiled carrots and turnips, with the cooking liquid used as Scots barley broth or Scots kale.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Boil Ox Cheek

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the ox cheek thoroughly and soak it in cold water overnight.

  2. Break the bone in two without breaking the flesh.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the ox cheek in a pot of boiling water and boil for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Remove the bone and serve with boiled carrots and turnips or savoys.

  3. Strain the cooking liquid to make Scots barley broth or Scots kale.

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. 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

Ox cheek
Its connective tissue softens into gelatin during long cooking, giving tender meat and a richer broth.

The step that matters

Boil the ox cheek for 2 to 3 hours. Connective tissue in the cheek only breaks down into gelatin after a long, steady cook. Stopping early leaves the meat tough and the broth thin.

“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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