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Ox-cheek, Stuffed

A slow‑cooked ox cheek served in a brown sauce with sherry and lemon, garnished with turnip and carrot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot 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 ↓

Ox-cheek, Stuffed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cheek

  1. Cover the ox cheek with cold water in a pot and bring to a boil, skimming well.

  2. Add thick-sliced vegetables, peppercorns, cloves, bouquet garni, and salt to the pot.

  3. Cook slowly for about 4 hours until bones are easily removed.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a brown roux by frying butter and flour together until nut-brown.

  2. Strain the broth into more than 1 pint of cooking liquid.

  3. Stir until boiling.

  4. Simmer for at least 10 minutes.

  5. Add sherry and lemon juice to the sauce.

  6. Season to taste.

Serve

  1. Bone the cheek and cut it into serving pieces.

  2. Add the cheek slices.

  3. Heat and serve.

  4. Garnish with separately cooked diced or julienne strips of turnip and carrot.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + carrottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ox cheek
Provides the rich, gelatinous meat that becomes tender during long, slow cooking.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux, carrying flavour and helping the sauce coat the meat.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with the roux, giving it body and a smooth texture.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the richness of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the richness and sharpens the flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux until nut-brown. Frying butter and flour develops colour and nutty flavour, but it burns quickly. Overcooked roux turns bitter and dark, while undercooked roux leaves the sauce tasting of raw flour and thin.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Applefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, butter, flour, sherry, turnip, carrot. 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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