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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made from ox tails, water, bread crust, salt, cream, and ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and ketchup work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 279 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the broth

  1. Clean and cut the ox tails into pieces.

  2. Boil the pieces quietly in water for several hours.

  3. Add the crust of bread and salt.

Finish and serve

  1. Once tender, strain the liquid and remove the fat.

  2. Thicken the soup with cream and stir in the ketchup.

  3. Serve with the tails cut into pieces.

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. Cream + ketchuptop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Bread + ketchuptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together813 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Bread + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Their collagen breaks down during long simmering, giving the broth body and a rich meaty flavor.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, slightly thicker texture to the finished soup.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity that round out the savory broth.

The step that matters

Keep the simmer gentle. Simmering quietly for several hours lets the tails become tender without toughening the meat. A hard, rolling boil breaks up the pieces and makes the broth cloudy and greasy, which is harder to skim and strain.

“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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