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Ox Tail Soup, Clear
Cut a fine fresh ox tail into pieces an inch long, and divide the thick part into four. Wash these pieces, and throw them into boiling water for a quarter of an hour; then drain, and wipe them with a soft cloth. Put them into a stewpan with two carrots, an onion stuck with three cloves, a sprig of parsley, a small piece of thyme, two or three sticks of celery, half a blade of mace, a tea-spoonful of salt, six or eight pepper-corns, and a quart of water or clear stock. Boil, remove the scum carefully as it rises, then draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and simmer very gently until the meat is tender. Lift out the pieces of ox tail, strain the soup, and if it is not clear and bright clarify it according to the directions given in CLEAR SOUP (MADE FROM BONES). Turn three carrots, and two turnips, into any small shapes that may be preferred, or into thin shreds an inch long, being careful only that they are all of the same size. Other vegetables may be used as well as turnips and carrots--such as French beans, green peas, asparagus, celery, or onions. Put these into a saucepan, pour the clarified stock over them, and simmer gently until the vegetables are tender. Heat the pieces of ox tail, pour the soup upon them, and serve as hot as possible. Time, about three hours to simmer the ox tail. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A classic clear consommé built on oxtail, written for a coal range where a pan could be drawn to the cooler side and left for hours. The technique translates directly; only the vessels and the vocabulary need translating.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the first skimA clear soup goes cloudy the moment it moves above a bare tremble, because agitation emulsifies fat and breaks up albumin. Bring it up, skim thoroughly, then hold it at 180-190F so the surface barely shivers for the whole three hours.
- Buying the tailAsk for a whole oxtail; they commonly run 2-4 lb. Having it cut at the joints rather than sawn through bone is easier, though the recipe as written asks for pieces an inch long. The thick butt end is what gets divided further.
- The blanching quarter-hourFifteen minutes in boiling water is not cooking, it is purging blood and scum so the finished soup stays bright. Discard that water, rinse the pieces, and start again with fresh stock.
- Liquid quantityA quart over a whole oxtail is tight by modern habit and will need topping up over three hours. Keep the pieces just covered and expect to add hot water or stock.
- Half a blade of maceMace is the dried aril that encases the nutmeg seed; a blade is one dried piece, so half a blade is roughly a quarter teaspoon of ground mace. The recipe adds it at the outset with the other aromatics.
- ClarifyingIf the strained broth is hazy, chill it, lift off the set fat, then whisk in one lightly beaten egg white per quart, bring it slowly to a bare simmer without stirring, and ladle the liquid out through a cloth once the raft has set. The recipe instead sends you to its own CLEAR SOUP (MADE FROM BONES) entry for the directions.
- "Turn" the vegetablesTurning means paring carrot and turnip with a small knife into uniform barrels or olives, though the recipe permits plain matchsticks. Uniformity is the point: mixed sizes give you both mush and raw batons in a soup with nothing to hide behind.
- Yield and costSix to eight portions. The '2s.' is Victorian shillings, and puts the dish at the cheap end of the butcher's counter rather than among luxuries.
Oxtail soup was one of the great thrift dishes of the nineteenth-century English kitchen: gelatinous, well-flavoured and, until fashion caught up with it, cheap. It is often traced to French Huguenot refugees in Spitalfields, who are said to have taken the tails discarded by London tanners and butchers, though the story is traditional rather than documented. What is documented is the ambition of this particular version. Cassell's treats a cut of offal with full consommé very simmered, strained, clarified with egg white, then garnished with vegetables cut to a uniform shape and cooked separately in the finished broth. That separation of stock from garnish is the mark of restaurant practice filtering into the middle-class household manual, where a clear soup was the expected opening to a dinner served à la russe.