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Ox-tail Stewed

A stew of ox tail with onion, carrot, turnip, and ketchup, simmered for two hours.

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 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.

  2. Remove the tail pieces and pour out excess fat.

  3. Return the tail to the pan with chopped onion, water, and ketchup.

  4. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

  5. 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
Long gentle stewing breaks down connective tissue, making the meat tender and rich in body.
Flour
Coats the meat so it browns well and helps thicken the stew liquid.
Dripping
Fat conducts heat for frying the tail and carries flavour for browning.
Onion
Softens during stewing and adds sweetness and savoury aroma to the broth.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the stew as it cooks.
Turnip
Softens during stewing and adds mild sweetness and earthy flavour.

The step that matters

Frying the floured tail until browned. Browning the flour-coated meat creates deep flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale, under-browned pieces give a flat stew, and excess fat should be poured off so the sauce is not greasy.

Swap the onion

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

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

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