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Hessian Soup and Ragout

A hearty soup made with ox-tails, split peas, vegetables, and seasonings, finished with a ragout of head and tongue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 22 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Hessian Soup and Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ox-tails

  1. Clean the ox-tails.

  2. Soak the ox-tails in water.

  3. Stew the ox-tails in 5-6 quarts of water until tender.

  4. Let the soup cool.

  5. Remove the fat from the soup for later use.

Make the soup

  1. Add split peas, carrots, turnips, potatoes, onions, sweet herbs, and celery to the soup.

  2. Simmer until the vegetables are tender enough to pulp with the peas through a sieve.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, mace, allspice, cloves, and Cayenne pepper.

  4. If the soup is not thick enough, add a slice of bread. Pulp the bread through a colander.

  5. Mix in rice flour gradually.

Make the ragout and finish

  1. For the Ragout, cut the best parts of the head and tongue into small pieces. Rub the pieces with seasoning.

  2. Simmer the pieces in a quart of the reserved soup until tender.

  3. Add mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, soy sauce, port wine, and mustard, and boil together.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tails
Provide rich meat and gelatin that give the stock body and savoury depth.
Split peas
Break down during simmering to thicken the soup and give it a smooth texture.
Potatoes
Break down when pulped, adding starch that thickens the soup further.
Onions
Add sweetness and aromatic flavour as they soften during long simmering.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds concentrated savoury umami flavour to the finished soup.
Port wine
Adds sweetness, depth and a fruity note to the ragout and soup.

The step that matters

Remove the fat after cooling. Fat from the stewed ox-tails rises and solidifies as the soup cools, so skimming it off gives a lighter, cleaner-tasting soup before the vegetables and thickeners are added.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, carrot, turnip, potato, onion, celery, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, carrot, turnip, potato, onion, celery, pepper. 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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