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Haricot of Ox Tails
Cut three ox tails in four-inch pieces; add one half cup carrot, one half cup onion, and four tablespoons butter. Cook ten minutes; add four tablespoons flour and four cups water or stock. Cook one hour; season with salt and pepper. Serve vegetables in the center and ox tails around the edge; garnish with potato balls and parsley.
A plain brown stew of oxtail, thickened with a butter-and-flour roux. Everything here works except the cooking time, which is far short of what oxtail needs.
- The time is the problemOne hour will not tenderize oxtail. The joints are dense connective tissue and need 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer before the meat pulls away from the bone. Judge by feel, not the clock.
- Cut the tails at the joints"Four-inch pieces" assumes a butcher with a cleaver. Oxtail comes cross-cut at the joints, in pieces of 1 to 2 inches at the thin end and 3 inches at the thick; buy it that way and use the whole tail. Three tails is a great deal of bone for 4 cups of liquid.
- Brown properlyThe ten minutes in butter presumably serves to color the meat and vegetables, and that color carries much of the flavor. Ten minutes over moderate heat will not do it. Brown the oxtail hard on all sides first, remove it, then soften the carrot and onion in the fat.
- The flour is a rouxFour tablespoons flour into four tablespoons butter, cooked a few minutes until it smells nutty, then the liquid added gradually. Add all four cups at once to raw flour and it will lump.
- LiquidStock, not water, if you have the choice; the original offers both. Keep the meat barely covered and top up as it reduces over three hours.
- Salt at the startThe recipe seasons at the end. Salt early in a long braise so the meat itself takes it up, and correct at the finish.
- Potato ballsPotato cut into small spheres with a scoop, boiled separately and tossed in butter. Small whole new potatoes serve the same purpose.
- Skim the fatOxtail throws a great deal of fat. Cooling the stew and lifting the solid cap off the next day gives a much cleaner sauce, and the dish reheats well.
- YieldServes 4 to 6 as a main course, allowing for how much of the weight is bone.
"Haricot" here has nothing to do with beans. The word in English cookery descends from the older French hericot or haricot de mouton, a stew of meat cut in pieces with root vegetables, and is generally traced to the verb harigoter, to cut up; the bean sense arrived separately and later, by way of Spanish, and is usually derived from a Nahuatl word. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookbooks are full of "haricot of mutton" and "haricot of veal" made without a single bean. Oxtail was a butcher's cheap cut in 1907 — offal, sold to households that knew how to simmer it. Lowney's Cook Book, compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is a general household manual with the firm's chocolate recipes folded in, which is why a page of oxtail sits comfortably in a book people remember for candy.