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Hotch-Potch, Ox-Tail
Divide an ox-tail at the joints, rub it with salt, and soak it in lukewarm water for an hour or two. Put it into a stewpan with a scraped carrot, a small bunch of savoury herbs, a bayleaf, two onions, one of them stuck with two cloves, a clove of garlic, six peppercorns, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and sufficient water to cover them. Simmer gently until the meat is tender and leaves the bones easily. Thicken with flour and butter, and serve with sippets round the dish. In the season, a pint of green peas, stewed in the gravy a few minutes before serving, is an improvement. Time, two hours. Probable cost, ox-tail, from 1s. to 2s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A plain braise that depends almost entirely on cooking the tail long enough. The two hours given here is optimistic for modern oxtail, which is usually cut from larger, older animals.
- Cook it much longerOxtail is dense collagen and needs three to four hours at a bare simmer, or roughly 45 minutes to an hour at pressure, before the meat slips from the bone. Two hours will give you tough meat in thin broth; judge by the bones, not the clock.
- Buying the tailAsk for a whole tail cut at the joints if the butcher will do it — the joints are hard to find with a knife alone. Two to three pounds serves three or four as written; the thin end pieces are mostly bone and best kept for the stock.
- The salt soakRubbing with salt and soaking in lukewarm water draws out blood and gives a clearer broth. It is optional now, but if you skip it, blanch the pieces for five minutes and rinse, then skim carefully during cooking.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter or dripping, arranged around the rim of the dish. Toast points work, but fried holds up better against the gravy.
- Thickening with flour and butterThe text does not say how; the usual reading is a kneaded paste of equal weights soft butter and flour (beurre manié) — roughly 1 oz of each per pint of liquid — whisked in in small pieces off the boil, then simmered two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour.
- Skim the fatOxtail renders a great deal of fat and the recipe says nothing about it. Best made a day ahead: chill overnight, lift the set fat off, then reheat and thicken. The flavour also improves.
- The peasA pint of shelled fresh peas is about 10 oz, or a 10–12 oz bag of frozen. Frozen peas need two or three minutes only, added at the very end, or they turn grey and mealy in the hot gravy.
- Cost\"1s. to 2s.\" marks oxtail as cheap butcher's meat in this period. It is now priced as a delicacy, which says more about fashion than about the cut.
Hotch-potch comes from the Anglo-Norman hochepot, a pot whose contents are shaken or jumbled together, and the same root gives English hodgepodge; in Scotland the name settled on a summer mutton broth thick with peas and young vegetables, which is why green peas appear here as the seasonal improvement. The dish belongs to the cheap stews built from what the trade called offal cuts — tail, cheek, shin — the parts left after the joints were sold, and long gentle simmering was the only way to make them palatable. Oxtail soup was a fixture of Victorian and Edwardian British cookery, and survived into the twentieth century largely in packet form.