Skip to main content
Main

Oxtail Soup

A hearty soup made with oxtail, onion, celery, herbs, peppercorns, and water, thickened with butter and flour, served with carrot and turnip.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and carrot 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 ↓

Oxtail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut up the oxtail and blanch it.

  2. Dry the oxtail pieces well.

  3. Melt half the butter in a stewpan.

Make the soup

  1. Add the oxtail pieces to the stewpan.

  2. Add the prepared vegetables to the stewpan.

  3. Fry for about 10 minutes until browned.

  4. Add the water and salt to the stewpan.

  5. Bring to a boil.

  6. Let it simmer for about 2 hours.

  7. Remove from heat.

  8. Strain the soup.

  9. In another pan, fry the flour in the remaining butter until browned.

  10. Add the browned flour mixture to the soup.

  11. Put the soup over the fire.

  12. Bring to a boil.

  13. Skim the soup.

  14. Season to taste.

Serve

  1. Strain into a tureen.

  2. Serve with the pieces of oxtail and cooked rounds of carrot and turnip.

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. Celery + carrottop 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. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 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

Oxtail (in the method)
Gives the soup its main meaty flavour and body as it simmers.
Butter
Fat that browns the vegetables and carries flavour into the soup.
Flour
Browned in butter and stirred in, it thickens the soup and adds a toasty note.
Onion
Softens and sweetens during frying, adding savoury depth to the broth.
Celery
Adds aromatic, savoury flavour to the simmering broth.

The step that matters

Fry the flour in butter until browned. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred and watched closely; under-cooked flour tastes raw and pasty, while over-browned flour turns bitter and darkens the soup unevenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, butter, flour, carrot, turnip):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, butter, flour, carrot, turnip. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipes