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Ox Cheek Soup

A hearty soup made from ox cheek simmered with herbs, vegetables, and optional additions, thickened with flour or roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Rice and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,065 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Ox Cheek Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the ox cheek in salt water, soak for several hours, and wipe dry.

  2. Fry the vegetables in a little hot fat.

Make the soup

  1. Add the ox cheek and cold water, bring to a boil, then skim.

  2. Cook gently for 4 to 5 hours, then strain the soup.

  3. Thicken with brown flour or roux and season to taste.

  4. Optional: add diced cheek, rice, or fried bread to the soup.

Serve

  1. Serve the meat hot with sauce or gravy.

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. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Bread + hamtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ox cheek
Provides rich meat and gelatin that enrich the broth during long, gentle cooking.
Brown flour or roux
Thickens the soup and gives it a deeper, toasted flavour and body.
Vegetables
Fried in fat first to build savoury, browned flavour that carries into the broth.

The step that matters

Cook gently for 4 to 5 hours. A gentle simmer breaks down the tough connective tissue in the cheek into gelatin, giving body and tenderness. A hard boil toughens the meat and makes the broth cloudy.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, rice, bread, ham, mushroom, onion):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, rice, bread, ham, mushroom, onion. 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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