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Clear Ox Tail Soup

A clear soup made from ox tail, vegetables, and seasonings, clarified with egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Clear Ox Tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tail

  1. Cut the ox-tail into short lengths and cover the pieces with cold water.

  2. Add a little coarse sea salt and bring to a boil.

  3. Strain.

Simmer the soup

  1. Return the tail to the saucepan with the vegetables, bouquet garni, and seasonings.

  2. Simmer gently for 4 hours, keeping the saucepan covered.

  3. Strain the soup and set the meat aside.

Clarify and serve

  1. Let the stock cool to remove the fat.

  2. Clarify the stock with the egg whites and shells, then strain again.

  3. Reheat the clarified stock.

  4. Serve garnished with pieces of the tail and fancy-cut 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tail
Gives the soup its meaty flavour and rich body as it simmers.
Egg whites and shells
Coagulate and collect impurities, clearing the stock to a limpid appearance.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the stock during simmering.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the stock during simmering.

The step that matters

Clarify the stock with the egg whites and shells. The stock must be fully cooled and fat removed first, and the egg mixture stirred in and brought to a gentle simmer without vigorous boiling. Boiling too hard breaks up the coagulated raft, so the clarification fails and the soup stays cloudy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, onion, celery, parsley, thyme, clove. 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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