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Oxtail Soup
1 oxtail, 2 quarts second stock or water, 2 onions, 2 carrots, 1 turnip, 2 strips celery, 4 tablespoons Crisco, a 1/2 cup diced lean ham or bacon, a bouquet-garni, 12 whole peppers, 2 cloves, salt, 1 glass sherry, and 1 tablespoon cornstarch.
Cut the tail into small joints, put it into a stewpan, cover with cold water, boil up and strain. Dry the pieces of oxtail, roll them in flour, put them with ham and sliced vegetables and Crisco into the stewpan, and fry until brown. Then add stock, herbs, whole peppers, cloves, and salt, boil and skim well. Put on lid and cook very gently for about 4 hours. Strain, remove fat, return to stewpan, and when soup boils add sherry and cornstarch smoothly mixed together, stir and cook for a few minutes. Serve smaller pieces of tail in soup, remainder may be reheated in a good brown sauce, and used as an entree.
A straightforward brown soup that asks for time rather than technique. The one thing that matters is the initial blanch and the browning: skip either and you get a greasy, cloudy broth instead of the clear, dark one intended.
- Second stock"Second stock" is the weaker liquid drawn from bones that have already given up one batch of broth, a standard economy in a household kitchen that stocked continuously. A light unsalted beef stock, or plain water, works; the oxtail supplies plenty of body on its own.
- CriscoCrisco stands here in place of the butter or drippings an older text would have specified; naming a proprietary shortening outright is characteristic of the cookbooks that promoted it. Four tablespoons of any neutral fat, or beef drippings, does the same job — you need it only to brown the meat and vegetables.
- Whole peppersTwelve whole peppers means twelve black peppercorns. Tie them with the cloves in a scrap of cheesecloth alongside the bouquet-garni so they come out with the strain.
- Bouquet-garniIn a book of this vintage that means parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied together — nothing more elaborate. Add a leek green if you have one.
- A glass of sherryA wineglass in books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter of a cup, though the measure was never standardised. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso rather than a sweet cream sherry, and give it the few minutes of cooking the recipe calls for to take off the raw edge.
- Four hours, and whyOxtail is heavily collagenous and genuinely needs the full time at a bare simmer — 3 1/2 to 4 hours until the meat slips from the bone. A pressure cooker will do it in about 50 minutes, though the broth is less clear. Do not let it boil hard or the soup turns muddy.
- Removing the fatOxtail throws a great deal of fat. The cleanest method is to strain the soup and chill it overnight, then lift the solid cap off before reheating and thickening.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon in two quarts gives only a light gloss, not a thick soup. Slake it in the cold sherry until smooth, then stir into the boiling liquid and cook two or three minutes to lose the raw starch taste.
- Yield and the second useAbout six to eight servings of soup. The instruction to reserve the larger joints for a brown-sauce entree is not an afterthought — one oxtail yields more meat than a soup needs, and the recipe expects the surplus to be used.
Oxtail soup came into English cookery as a thrift dish and stayed as a luxury one. Recipes appear in English books from around the turn of the nineteenth century, and the often-repeated story that tails reached cooks as a butcher's offcut passed on with hides to tanners is traditional rather than documented. By the Victorian era oxtail soup was familiar in both a clear and a thickened form. This particular version belongs to the early twentieth-century American cookbook trade, and its most telling detail is the naming of Crisco: the hydrogenated shortening was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 and heavily promoted through recipe books, so its appearance in place of the butter or drippings an older text would have specified puts the page no earlier than that, though Crisco continued to be named in recipes for decades afterwards. The closing instruction to serve the small joints in the soup and dress the rest in brown sauce as a separate entree reflects a kitchen where one purchase was expected to furnish two courses.