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Ox-tail Soup

A hearty soup made from ox tails, onions, carrots, celery, and herbs simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ox-tail Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the ox-tails at the joints into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Cut each joint to the bone to allow the juice to escape during boiling.

Brown

  1. In a stewpan, heat the minced salt pork, then add the sliced onion.

  2. Fry until the onion begins to color, then add the ox-tails.

  3. Fry the tails for 5 to 8 minutes, browning on all sides.

Simmer and strain

  1. Transfer everything to a soup kettle and add the boiling water.

  2. Simmer gently for about 4 hours.

  3. Add the sliced vegetables and the cloves stuck into a piece of onion.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. Once the vegetables are cooked, strain the soup through a fine strainer.

  6. Serve 1 joint and ½ cup of soup for each person.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Ox-tails
Break down during long simmering to release gelatin and rich meaty flavor into the broth.
Salt pork
Renders fat that carries flavor and adds richness to the soup base.
Onion
Browns to build sweet, savory aroma and depth in the broth.
Carrots
Add sweetness and body to the soup as they cook in the broth.

The step that matters

Browning the ox-tails. Browning on all sides creates Maillard flavors that the long simmer cannot produce on its own. Pale, steamed meat gives a flat, grey-tasting broth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, carrot, celery, parsley, clove, pepper):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, carrot, celery, parsley, clove, 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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