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Ox Tail Soup, Thick

A thick soup made with ox tail, vegetables, and stock, finished with port wine and flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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, Thick

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Joint the ox tail, wash it well, and fry it until browned.

  2. Clean the carrots, turnips, and celery, and cut the ham into small squares.

Make the soup

  1. In a pan, heat the butter until hot, then add the flour and stir until browned.

  2. Add the stock and all remaining ingredients, except the port wine, and simmer until the ox tail is tender.

  3. Skim off the fat, season to taste, add the port wine, and strain into a tureen.

  4. If preferred, rub the vegetables through a sieve and add them to the soup, along with the best pieces of the tail.

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. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Turnip + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 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 tail
Provides rich meaty flavour and body as it simmers until tender.
Butter
Carries fat for frying and helps build a browned, savoury base.
Flour
Browned with the butter to thicken the soup and add nutty colour.
Stock
Forms the liquid base that the soup simmers in.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and aroma when stirred in just before serving.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body, softening into the soup when rubbed through a sieve.

The step that matters

Brown the flour in the butter. Flour must be stirred until evenly browned but not burnt. Browning removes raw starch taste and gives colour, while burnt flour turns bitter and dark.

Swap the garlic

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, carrot, turnip, celery, ham, clove, sugar):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, carrot, turnip, celery, ham, clove, sugar. 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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