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Ox Tails to Stew

A hearty stew of ox tails simmered with onions, carrots, herbs, and bacon, thickened with browned flour and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Ox Tails to Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Divide the ox tails at the joints.

  2. Scald or parboil the tails.

  3. Fry the tails in a stew pan with butter to prevent burning.

Stew the tails

  1. Stew the tails slowly in enough broth or water to create gravy until tender.

  2. Season the stew with salt, pepper, cayenne, chopped parsley, and mustard.

  3. Thicken the gravy with browned flour.

Make the onion and bacon base

  1. In a separate pot, combine the chopped onions, carrots, herbs, bay leaf, and cloves.

  2. Cover the pot with bacon slices and moisten with broth or boiling water.

  3. Cover tightly and simmer until the meat is tender.

Prepare and serve the vegetables

  1. Boil the cut carrots and turnips.

  2. Stew the boiled carrots and turnips in melted butter.

  3. Serve the stewed vegetables alongside the ox tails.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Tough connective tissue that becomes tender and rich-tasting after long, slow stewing.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Bacon
Adds savory, smoky fat that flavors the onion and vegetable base.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they stew, building depth in the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps prevent the tails from scorching when frying.

The step that matters

Stew the tails slowly until tender. Ox tail is rich in collagen that only breaks down into gelatin with long, gentle simmering. Boiling hard or rushing can leave the meat tough and the gravy thin.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, parsley, mustard, flour, carrot, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, mustard, flour, carrot, thyme. 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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