Ox-tail Soup
1 small ox-tail 6 cups Brown Stock Carrot, Turnip (1/2 cup each, cut in fancy shapes) Onion, Celery (1/2 cup each, cut in small pieces) 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup Madeira wine 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce 1 teaspoon lemon juice Cut ox-tail in small pieces, wash, drain, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and fry in butter ten minutes. Add to Brown Stock, and simmer one hour. Then add vegetables, which have been parboiled twenty minutes; simmer until vegetables are soft, add salt, cayenne, wine, Worcestershire Sauce, and lemon juice.
A classic brown soup built on stock, with the oxtail treated almost as a garnish. The one thing to change is the cooking time.
- Oxtail needs far longer than an hourOxtail is dense collagen and will still be tough and stringy after 60 minutes of simmering. Give it 2 1/2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, until the meat slips off the bone, then add the vegetables. The gelatin released is what gives the soup its body.
- Brown StockThe book means its own recipe: beef and bones browned in fat before being simmered with aromatics. A good unsalted beef stock works, but browning first is what separates this from a pale broth. Six cups will reduce noticeably over a long simmer, so start with seven or eight.
- "Fancy shapes"Period cooks used small tin vegetable cutters, or turned carrot and turnip into little olive shapes with a knife. Neat 1/4-inch dice is a legitimate substitute; the point is uniform pieces that hold together in clear soup.
- Parboiling the vegetablesTwenty minutes of parboiling probably served to soften the vegetables and take the edge off turnip and onion before they went into the soup. If you are simmering the oxtail the full three hours, add the raw vegetables in the last 25 minutes instead and skip the parboil.
- Skim the fatOxtail is very fatty and frying it in butter adds more. Cool the soup and lift the solid fat from the surface, or blot it with paper, before adding the wine and lemon juice. Otherwise the finish tastes greasy rather than sharp.
- Madeira and Worcestershire go in lastBoth are added off the heat or with the pot barely bubbling. Long boiling drives off the aromatics in the wine and leaves only a flat sweetness.
- DredgingThe flour on the fried oxtail is the only thickener. It gives a lightly bound soup, not a thick one; if you want it clearer, brown the meat without flour.
- YieldAbout six cups finished, or four servings as a first course. One small oxtail is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb.