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Ox Tail Soup

A hearty soup made with ox tails, pork, onion, carrots, celery, parsley, cloves, and catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 into lengths that fit into a frying pan.

  2. Fry the slice of pork in a pan until the fat renders, then add the sliced onion and cook until golden.

  3. Add the ox tails to the pan and fry, turning often until slightly browned all over.

  4. Cut the browned ox tails into smaller sections and place them in a soup kettle with 4 quarts of water and the cooked onion.

Simmer and finish

  1. Cook slowly for several hours, keeping the temperature at a simmer until the meat falls from the bones.

  2. Add the sliced carrots, celery (or celery salt), parsley, and cloves, and cook until the vegetables are soft.

  3. Season with salt, strain the soup, and add the catsup.

  4. If desired, add the farina half an hour before serving for extra thickness.

  5. If you dislike pork, substitute with butter.

Serve

  1. For serving, heat the tureen with hot water and serve with crisp thin crackers.

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. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Ox tails
Release collagen and flavor into the broth as they simmer, giving body and richness to the soup.
Pork
Renders fat into the pan that carries flavor for browning the onion and ox tails.
Onion
Browns to add sweetness and savory depth to the broth.
Farina
Thickens the soup slightly when added near the end of cooking.

The step that matters

Browning the ox tails. Frying the ox tails until browned creates Maillard reactions that develop deeper, roasted flavor in the broth. Pale meat yields a flatter-tasting soup.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Fennelfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, butter. 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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