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Haricot Ox Tail
Slice an onion and fry it in a little butter; chop an ox tail into small pieces, and put them into the saucepan with the onion. Add six cloves, one piece of ginger, pepper and salt to taste, and allow it to simmer for about an hour. Cut three turnips and three carrots into slices, not too thin, put with the ox tail, and stew for another hour and a half. Thicken with a little flour, and, if not dark enough, add a few drops of browning.
A plain braise with one significant omission: the recipe never tells you to add liquid. Oxtail will not stew in its own juices, so read the whole thing as a covered pot braise in water or stock.
- "Haricot" here means a stewIn Victorian English cookery a haricot is a brown stew of meat with root vegetables; the name is usually traced to Old French harigoter, to cut up, and to the dish halicot de mouton, rather than to the bean. No beans are intended and none should be added.
- The missing liquidAdd water or beef stock to just cover the meat once the onion and oxtail are in the pan, and keep the lid on. Top up as needed so the pieces stay submerged until the vegetables go in.
- Cooking time is shortTwo and a half hours total will usually leave oxtail chewy. Give the meat alone three hours at a bare simmer, then add the root vegetables for the final 45 minutes to an hour so they hold their shape rather than dissolving into the sauce.
- "Chop an ox tail into small pieces"Ask the butcher to cut it at the joints; the vertebrae are heavy bone and not worth attacking with a domestic knife. One tail of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb serves three or four.
- One piece of gingerGenuinely ambiguous. Victorian recipes usually meant a knob of dried root about an inch long, bruised; a similar piece of fresh ginger, left whole and fished out at the end, gives a comparable result.
- Six clovesThat is a strong hand for one tail. Tie the cloves and ginger in muslin so they can be removed, or reduce the cloves to three or four if you want the beef to lead.
- Skim the fatOxtail throws a great deal of fat, and the recipe gives no instruction for dealing with it. Chilling the stew overnight and lifting the set cap is the easiest method and improves the flavour.
- BrowningThe bottled "browning" of the period was typically burnt-sugar caramel, sold as gravy browning or Parisian essence. A teaspoon of modern gravy browning, or a spoonful of home-made caramel, does much the same job and is used chiefly for colour; dark soy will also work but adds salt and savour of its own.
- ThickeningA little flour stirred in at the end will taste raw. Either work it into softened butter and whisk it in, then simmer five minutes, or dust the oxtail with flour before frying so it cooks in the browning stage.
Oxtail was cheap meat in nineteenth-century Britain, a by-product of the slaughterhouse sold to households willing to spend hours over a low fire, and it appears throughout Victorian cookery books in soups, stews and "haricots" for exactly that reason. The word haricot in this sense is generally said to be older than the vegetable it now names: English cooks are thought to have borrowed it from French halicot, a stew of cut-up meat with turnips and other roots, and by the eighteenth century it had become a standard term for a brown stew of mutton, then of beef. The recipe reads as a demonstration piece: fry the aromatics, brown and simmer the tough cut, add the roots late, thicken and colour the liquor. The final instruction about browning is a period marker in itself, since bottled caramel colouring was a fixture of the late Victorian store cupboard.