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Stewed Ox-tail

A slow‑cooked stew of ox tail with onion, mace, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, and a butter‑flour thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Stewed Ox-tail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tail

  1. Wipe and joint the ox tail, removing any excess fat, then blanch it to cleanse.

Simmer

  1. Place the pieces of tail into a stewpan with the stock and salt; bring to a boil and skim.

  2. Add the vegetables, mace, and peppercorns; simmer for 2.5 to 3 hours.

Thicken and serve

  1. To thicken the sauce, melt the butter, add the flour, and brown them carefully.

  2. Add the stock from the tail to the butter and flour mixture, stirring until boiling.

  3. Return the pieces of tail to the sauce and 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. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tail
Provides rich meat and gelatin that give the stew body and a silky mouthfeel as it simmers.
Butter and flour
Cooked together into a roux, they thicken the stock into a smooth, glossy sauce.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth to the stock as it simmers.
Carrot and turnip
Add natural sweetness and body to the stew while they soften in the liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. The flour must be cooked gently until nutty and smooth; if it is rushed or burnt it tastes bitter, and if it is under-cooked it stays pasty. Stirring steadily keeps lumps from forming when the stock is added.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

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