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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tail, onions, carrots, turnip, celery, thyme, and seasonings, 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

Make 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; cook for 5 minutes.

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

Simmer and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a stew pan, add the water, and simmer for 3 hours.

  2. About 1 hour before serving, add the shredded celery and thyme, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  3. Serve with a teaspoonful of Yorkshire Relish per half-pint of soup.

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
Gives the soup its meaty flavour and body as it simmers slowly for hours.
Dripping
Carries flavour and adds richness, helping the onions and vegetables brown in the pan.
Flour
Cooked in the fat, it thickens the soup and gives it a fuller, silkier body.
Onions
Break down during cooking to add sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the soup as it softens.
Turnip
Adds earthy sweetness and a soft texture after long simmering.

The step that matters

Fry the ox tail before simmering. Browning the meat in hot fat builds roasted, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, which the long simmer alone cannot create. Stirring keeps the flour and vegetables from scorching.

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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