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Ox-tail Stewed

A slow‑cooked stew of ox tail with onion, carrot, turnip, ketchup, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip 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 Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oxtail

  1. Wash the ox-tail in warm water and cut it into joints, halving the larger ones.

  2. Dry the pieces and mix flour, salt, and pepper on a plate.

  3. Rub each piece of tail with the flour mixture.

Brown and stew

  1. Heat dripping in a stew-pan and fry the pieces of tail until browned, then remove them.

  2. Pour out excess fat, return the tail to the pan, and add chopped onion, water, and ketchup.

  3. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  4. Add carrot and turnip pieces and stew for an additional 45 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 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-tail
Slow stewing breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and the broth rich.
Flour
Coats the meat so it browns well and helps thicken the stewing liquid.
Dripping
Conducts heat for frying the tail and carries flavour into the browned surface.
Ketchup
Adds tomato acidity and sweetness, deepening the colour and savoury flavour of the sauce.
Onion
Releases sugars and aromatic compounds during stewing, sweetening and flavouring the broth.

The step that matters

Browning the floured tail. Frying the floured pieces until browned creates Maillard flavour and colour on the surface. Pale meat added to the stew results in a flat, greyish sauce, so the pieces should be properly browned before liquid goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, ketchup, carrot, turnip, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, ketchup, carrot, turnip, pepper. 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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