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Ox- Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox-tails, beef, vegetables, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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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- Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat and vegetables

  1. Cut the ox-tails into pieces at the joints.

  2. Fry the ox-tails in butter with the gravy beef, carrot, turnip, onions, leek, celery, sweet herbs, and bay leaf.

  3. Add ½ cup of water and peppercorns; stir until the pan is glazed.

Make the soup

  1. Fill the stewpan with 3 quarts of water and stir occasionally.

  2. Once boiling, reduce heat and let simmer until the tails are tender.

  3. Remove the tails and set aside.

  4. Boil the fancy-shaped turnip, carrot, button onions, and celery in a little soup until tender.

  5. Strain the soup through a fine cloth, add the vegetables and ox-tails back in.

Season and thicken

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and lump sugar.

  2. For a thicker soup, add a little brown roux.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 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-tails
Release gelatin and rich flavor into the broth during long simmering.
Gravy beef
Adds meaty flavor and body to the broth as it simmers.
Butter
Carries the frying of the meat and vegetables, helping them brown for deeper flavor.
Brown roux
Thickens the soup by swelling starch granules as it heats in the liquid.

The step that matters

Frying the ox-tails and vegetables until glazed. Browning the meat and vegetables builds deep flavor through the Maillard reaction. Pale frying gives a flat, thin-tasting broth, so the pan should be well browned before the water goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, beef, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, beef, carrot, turnip, leek, celery, 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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