Ox-tail Soup
1 sprig parsley 2 tablespoons carrot 2 tablespoons celery 2 teaspoons salt 3 tablespoons Madeira wine 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Cut ox-tails at joints, add onion, and sauté in pork fat; add cold water, and simmer four hours; add vegetables and seasonings; simmer one hour. Strain; cool; remove fat. Brown butter; add flour and brown; add strained stock, brown stock and meat cut from bones. Reheat, add Madeira, and serve.
A straightforward long-simmered tail broth, thickened at the end with a brown roux. The printed ingredient list has clearly been truncated — the oxtails, onion, pork fat and brown stock all appear in the method but never in the list, so quantities for those are yours to set.
- The hinge: brown the roux properlyMuch of the soup's colour and flavour comes from browning the butter, then browning the flour in it until it is the shade of a hazelnut shell. A rushed, pale roux gives a thinner, floury-tasting broth.
- Missing quantitiesAssume 2 to 2 1/2 lb of oxtail, one medium onion, a tablespoon or so of pork fat (bacon fat or lard is the same thing here), and about a cup of brown stock at the end. Cold water should cover the tails by two inches — roughly 2 quarts.
- "Brown stock"In books of this period this means a separate stock made from beef and bones browned before simmering. Any dark unsalted beef stock does the job; it is there for depth, not bulk.
- Two teaspoons salt is for the whole potThe recipe adds it late, with the vegetables, not at the start. Salt lightly at that stage and correct after the soup is thickened.
- Vegetables in tablespoonsTwo tablespoons each of carrot and celery means finely diced, and they go in only for the last hour so they still taste of something. If you want them as garnish, dice a fresh batch and cook them separately.
- Chilling to degrease"Cool; remove fat" works best overnight in the refrigerator — the fat sets into a lid you can lift off whole. Oxtail throws a great deal of fat, and skimming a warm pot leaves most of it behind.
- Madeira goes in off the heatAdd it at the very end and serve. Boiling it drives off the aromatics that are the reason for using Madeira rather than more stock.
- YieldAbout six cups after straining and skimming, serving four as a first course.
Oxtail was a butcher's offcut, cheap and gelatinous, and it became a fixture of nineteenth-century soup cookery precisely because long simmering turns its collagen into body that no amount of flour can imitate. The style here — tails browned in pork fat, simmered for hours, then finished with a dark roux and a spoonful of fortified wine — is the Anglo-American reading of a French *potage*, and the Madeira suggests a company dish rather than everyday fare. *Lowney's Cook Book* (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like many house cookbooks of the era it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a full conventional course-by-course manual so the volume would earn a permanent place on the kitchen shelf. The instructions are compressed and telegraphic, and the ingredient list as printed has lost half its entries.