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Ox-tail Stewed

A slow-cooked stew of ox tail, vegetables, and ketchup, seasoned with flour, salt, pepper, and cooking fat.

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 tail

  1. Wash the ox tail in warm water and cut it into pieces at the joints.

  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 the remaining fat and return the tail to the pan with chopped onion, water, and ketchup.

  3. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

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

Serve

  1. Serve the meat in the center of a dish with the vegetables around it.

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
Provides the meat and collagen-rich connective tissue that becomes tender during long, gentle stewing.
Flour
Coats the tail pieces so they brown well and help thicken the stew liquid.
Dripping
Fat for frying the tail, building browned flavour before the stew cooks.
Ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity, deepening the savoury flavour of the stewing liquid.
Onion
Releases sweetness and aroma as it cooks into the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Browning the floured tail in the fat. Frying until deeply browned develops savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale pieces leave the finished stew tasting flat and bland.

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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