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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made from ox tails, water or stock, butter, flour, onion, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the ox tails at the joints and dust them with flour.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan and brown the pieces of tail with the sliced onion.

  3. Pour in the stock or water, bring to a boil, and skim thoroughly.

Make the soup

  1. Add the vegetables and spices, and let the soup boil until the meat is tender but not falling off the bones.

  2. Strain the soup and reserve the pieces of tail.

  3. Remove all fat from the soup and return it to the saucepan.

  4. Boil for five minutes and skim thoroughly.

  5. Add the pieces of tail back into the soup and serve hot.

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

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

  4. Flour + turniptop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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-rich body that gives the soup its savoury richness.
Flour
Coats the tail pieces so they brown well and help thicken the soup slightly.
Butter or dripping
Carries the heat for browning the tails and onion, adding fat and roasted flavour.
Onion
Browns with the tails to build savoury, sweet depth in the base of the soup.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and body to the stock as it simmers.
Turnip
Adds mild sweetness and earthy flavour to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Skim thoroughly. Foam and fat rising from the boiling stock can make the soup cloudy and greasy. Skimming as it comes up keeps the broth clear and clean-tasting.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, onion, carrot, turnip. 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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