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Ox Tail, Haricot Of
Take two fresh ox tails, joint them, and divide them into convenient-sized pieces. Put them into boiling water, and let them simmer for a quarter of an hour; then take them up, drain them, and trim them neatly. Cover the bottom of a stewpan with any trimmings of meat or poultry that may be at hand; put in the pieces of ox tail, and with them a large onion stuck with four cloves, a few sticks of celery, a large bunch of parsley, a bay-leaf, a piece of garlic the size of a small pea, a quarter of a blade of mace, a tea-spoonful of salt, a dozen pepper-corns, and two quarts of water or stock. Let them boil, then simmer gently until the meat will part easily from the bone. Carefully lift out the pieces of ox tail, and put them aside; strain the gravy, and return it to the saucepan. When it boils thicken with a little flour and butter, and put into it half a pound of carrots and half a pound of turnips neatly shaped, and six or eight medium-sized onions. Boil gently until the vegetables are tender, skim the sauce carefully, and put in the pieces of ox tail. Add a little more salt and pepper if required, and a table-spoonful of browning; simmer ten minutes longer, and serve very hot. A pint of white haricot beans is a great improvement to this dish. They should be put to soak the day before they are wanted, and boiled separately in plenty of water until tender; then drained, and put as a border round the dish in which the stew is served. Time, two hours and a half or more to boil the tails. Probable cost of tails, 1s. to 2s. each. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A two-stage oxtail braise: the tails are cooked to tenderness in a heavily aromatic broth, the broth is then strained, thickened and used to cook the garnish. Nothing in it is difficult, but a few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- Chill the stock and lift the fatOxtail renders a great deal of fat, and the recipe's instruction to "skim the sauce carefully" is the hinge of the dish. The reliable method is to strain the cooking liquid, refrigerate it until the fat sets in a solid cap, and lift it off before thickening; otherwise the finished sauce is greasy no matter how much you skim hot.
- "Haricot" here means the stew, not the beanThe dish is a haricot in the old sense of a braise with turned root vegetables. The white haricot beans at the end are a border the recipe recommends as "a great improvement" rather than requires, and it is often suggested that they crept in once the two senses of the word had converged. The stew works without them.
- Quantities and timingTwo oxtails is roughly 4-7 lb depending on size, consistent with the stated seven or eight servings. The recipe's own "two hours and a half or more" is a minimum; three to four hours at a bare simmer is closer to what modern oxtail needs to fall from the bone. Ask a butcher to joint them if the pieces come whole.
- BrowningA tablespoonful of browning means gravy browning, essentially caramelised sugar with salt. A teaspoon of dark caramel, or a small amount of dark soy or mushroom ketchup, does the same work; taste before adding a full tablespoon, as bottled brownings vary considerably in strength and saltiness.
- Mace and the garlicA quarter of a blade of mace is a fragment of the lacy aril around nutmeg, about a pinch of ground mace. "A piece of garlic the size of a small pea" is a fraction of a clove, and reflects British caution about garlic at the time; a whole clove or two will not unbalance anything.
- The bed of trimmingsLining the pan with odd scraps of meat or poultry enriches the broth and stops the tails catching. If you have no trimmings, a few chicken wings or a veal bone do the same job, or simply brown the oxtail pieces first and rely on the fond.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" most likely means butter and flour kneaded together (beurre manie) and whisked into the boiling liquid in small pieces. For two quarts reduced somewhat, start with about 1 oz of each and add more only after it has boiled a minute and shown its true thickness.
- The vegetablesHalf a pound each of carrots and turnips "neatly shaped" means turned into even barrel shapes so they cook at the same rate. Cut them in equal chunks if you would rather not turn them, and add the small onions first since they take longest.
The name is a fossil. French haricot de mouton is generally traced to the old verb harigoter, to cut into pieces, and described a braise of chopped meat with root vegetables long before the New World bean reached European kitchens; once the bean acquired the name haricot, English cooks began putting beans into a dish that had never required them, which is exactly what Cassell's does here with its optional pint of white haricots as a border. The cut itself belonged to the economical end of the Victorian table. Oxtail was cheap offal from the slaughterhouse, priced here at a shilling or two apiece, and the long collagen-heavy braise that makes it worth eating also produced the gelatinous stock behind oxtail soup, a staple of the same period. That a tough, inexpensive cut is dressed up with turned carrots and turnips, onions boiled in the sauce and a browning-darkened finish is characteristic of Cassell's approach: restaurant presentation applied to household economy.