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Ox Tail Jardiniere

A stew of ox tails with onions, carrots, turnips, cloves, mace, bay leaf, thyme, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 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 ↓

Ox Tail Jardiniere

Ingredients

Directions

Braise the ox tails

  1. Cut the ox tails into 1-inch thick pieces and place them in a stewpan.

  2. Add onions, carrot, turnip, cloves, mace, bay leaf, thyme, and salt.

  3. Cover with clear stock or water and simmer until tender.

Cook the vegetables

  1. In another stewpan, melt butter and add carrots, turnips, and tiny onions.

  2. Cook over high heat for 10 minutes, tossing occasionally.

  3. Add white stock and stew until vegetables are tender.

Combine and serve

  1. Remove ox tails from the stewpan, drain, and add to the vegetable mixture.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and port wine if desired, then serve.

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).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Turnip + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,352 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Collagen-rich connective tissue breaks down during slow simmering, turning tough meat tender and giving the stew body.
Onions
Release sugars and aromatic compounds as they cook, adding sweetness and depth to the stock.
Carrots
Hold their shape during stewing while adding natural sweetness and body to the vegetable mixture.
Turnips
Firm root vegetable that becomes tender in the stew, adding mild sweetness and earthy flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the vegetables brown lightly and carry flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering the ox tails until tender. Ox tail is tough connective tissue. Collagen only converts to gelatin with long, gentle simmering, so cooking too hard or too briefly leaves the meat chewy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, turnip, clove, thyme, butter, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, turnip, clove, thyme, butter, 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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