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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, root vegetables, herbs, and spices, thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery 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 ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the ox tails and cut them into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Place the tails in a large pot with carrots, celery, turnips, onions, sweet herbs, allspice, and peppercorns.

  3. Add 7 pints of prepared stock or enough water to cover 4 pounds of gravy beef.

Simmer

  1. Simmer until the tails are tender.

  2. Remove small pieces of tail for serving in the soup.

  3. Continue to simmer the remaining meat until it falls off the bones.

Finish the soup

  1. Skim off all the fat.

  2. Thicken the soup with flour and butter.

  3. Strain the soup through a sieve.

  4. Add brown coloring, catsup, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  5. Return the pieces of tail to the soup and bring to a boil before serving.

  6. Optionally, add diced carrot and celery for garnish.

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 + celerytop 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. Carrot + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + oniontop 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

Ox tails
Give the soup its rich beefy flavor and gelatin-based body as they cook down.
Flour
Thickens the soup, giving it a fuller, smoother body.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour thicken the soup smoothly.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and aroma to the simmering broth.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with flour and butter. Flour clumps if added directly to hot liquid. Cooking it into butter first, or whisking it into a small amount of liquid, lets starch granules separate and thicken the soup evenly.

Swap the allspice

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

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

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