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Ox-tail Ragout

A stew of ox tails, turnips, carrots, onions, and black peppercorns thickened with flour and flavored with port or Madeira wine, soy sauce, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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-tail Ragout

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Chop the ox-tails through every joint.

  2. Combine the ox-tails with turnips, carrots, onions, and black peppercorns in a saucepan.

  3. Stew for four hours until tender.

Finish the ragout

  1. Remove the ox-tails and cut them into pieces at every joint.

  2. Combine the ox-tail pieces with good gravy and scraped turnip and carrot in a stewpan.

  3. Thicken the gravy with a little flour.

  4. Add port or Madeira wine, soy sauce, and cayenne.

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. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + oniontop 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. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tails
Provide the meat and collagen that become tender and rich during long stewing.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and vegetables.
Port or madeira wine
Adds depth and sweetness to the gravy as it is added near the end.
Soy sauce
Adds savory depth and umami to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stew for four hours until tender. Ox-tail is rich in connective tissue that needs long, gentle, moist cooking to break down into gelatin. Stopping early leaves the meat tough, while a hard boil can toughen it and make the sauce cloudy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, flour, madeira wine, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, flour, madeira wine, sauce. 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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