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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tail, onions, carrot, turnip, celery, thyme, and Yorkshire Relish, simmered in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the base

  1. In a frying pan, melt the dripping over medium heat and stir in the flour.

  2. Add the sliced onions, diced carrot, and diced turnip to the pan and cook for 5 minutes.

  3. Add the ox tail pieces and fry for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Simmer and season

  1. Transfer the contents of the frying pan to a stew pan, add the water, and simmer for about 3 hours.

  2. One hour before serving, add the shredded celery and thyme, seasoning with pepper and salt to taste.

  3. Before serving, stir in 1 teaspoon of Yorkshire Relish for flavor.

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 + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ox tail
Connective tissue breaks down during long simmering, giving the soup body and richness.
Dripping
Fat carries flavor and helps brown the vegetables and meat.
Flour
Cooked into the fat, it thickens the soup as it simmers.
Onions
Softened and sweetened as they cook, they build the savory base.
Carrot
Softens and adds natural sweetness to the broth.
Turnip
Adds mild, earthy sweetness and body as it softens.

The step that matters

Simmer the ox tail gently for the full time. Ox tail is rich in connective tissue that needs long, gentle heat to break down into gelatin. A hard boil toughens the meat and can make the broth cloudy and greasy.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, carrot, turnip, celery, thyme, 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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