Ox-Tail Soup
1 ox-tail 1 qt. brown stock 1 tablespoon salt Few grains cayenne Wash and cut ox-tail in small pieces, dredge one-half of joints with Gold Medal flour, sprinkle with salt and pepper and brown in hot fat. Add to the rest and simmer until perfectly tender, in enough water to cover. Take out the browned joints and boil the rest to rags. Strain, cool, and remove the fat. Reheat this stock, add the brown stock, salt and pepper, and the reserved joints.
A straightforward two-stage soup: half the tail is browned and kept whole for the bowl, the other half is cooked to collapse to enrich the liquid. The original assumes you already have a quart of brown stock on hand.
- The hingeDo not let the reserved browned joints cook to pieces. They go back into the finished soup as the meat you actually eat, so they should be simmered only until a fork slides in — roughly 2½ to 3 hours — while the other half keeps going until it falls apart.
- Buying an ox-tailWhat the market sells as oxtail today is beef tail, usually from a steer or heifer rather than a working ox, and it comes already cut into rounds. One tail is about 2 to 3 lb; ask for the thicker joints, which have more meat.
- Brown stockA quart of homemade brown beef stock, or good low-sodium beef broth. If using commercial broth, hold back most of the tablespoon of salt until the end — a tablespoon is calibrated for unsalted homemade stock and will overwhelm a salted one.
- DredgingPat the joints dry before flouring or they will steam rather than brown. A thin coat is enough; excess flour scorches in the fat and turns the soup bitter.
- Timing"Boil the rest to rags" means 4 hours or more at a bare simmer. A hard boil clouds the liquid and toughens the meat; keep it at the barest tremble, or use a covered pot in a 300°F oven.
- DegreasingOxtail throws a great deal of fat. The recipe says only to strain, cool and remove the fat; chilling the strained stock and lifting off the solid cap is far more effective than skimming warm.
- Seasoning"Few grains cayenne" means a pinch, less than ⅛ teaspoon. The recipe says pepper twice without ever listing black pepper in the ingredients; season to taste at both stages.
- YieldAbout 6 cups, serving 4 to 6 as a first course. A splash of sherry or Madeira at the end is period-appropriate and welcome.
Ox-tail soup came into English and American cookery as thrift dressed up: the tail was a butcher's offcut, cheap because it is nearly all bone, connective tissue and skin, yet that collagen makes a broth with more body than any prime cut can give. It appears in nineteenth-century English cookbooks as both a clear soup and a thick one, and by the time this book was printed it was standard enough that a flour company could assume its readers knew what to do with it. Its presence here is also a small piece of marketing he drecipe needs flour at all, and the brand name is duly inserted. The two-stage method, sacrificing half the meat to the pot and saving half for the bowl, is a way of getting both a rich liquid and something to chew.