Ox-Tail Soup
INGREDIENTS for soup for 10 or 12 persons.-2 ox-tails, 2 slices of ham, 1 oz. of butter, 2 carrots, 2 turnips, 3 onions, 1 leek, 1 head of celery, 1 bunch of savoury herbs, 1 bay-leaf, 12 whole peppercorns, 4 cloves, a tablespoonful of salt, 2 tablespoonfuls of ketchup, 1/21 glass of port wine, 3 quarts of water. AVERAGE COST, 5s. 6d.
Cut up the tails, separating them at the joints; wash them, and put them in a stewpan with the butter. Cut the vegetables into slices and add them, with the peppercorns and herbs. Put in ½ pint of water, and stir it over a sharp fire till the juices are drawn. Fill up the stewpan with the water, and, when boiling, add the salt.
Skim well, and simmer very gently for 4½ hours, or until the tails are tender. Take them out, skim and strain the soup, thicken with flour, and flavour with the ketchup and port wine. Put back the tails, simmer for 5 minutes, and serve.
TIME.-4 hours.
SEASONABLE in winter.
A straightforward brown broth built on gelatinous oxtail; the only real difficulty is that the printed text has suffered in transcription and the thickening is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- Garbled fraction"1/21 glass of port" is almost certainly half a wine glass, a wineglassful being reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so roughly 1 fl oz. The ½ pint of water is correct as printed; it is only there to keep the meat from catching while the juices draw, so the exact amount matters little.
- Ketchup is not tomatoIn Beeton's kitchen ketchup means mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment. Tomato ketchup will make the soup sweet. Use mushroom ketchup, or a mixture of Worcestershire sauce and a little soy for similar savoury depth.
- Draw the juices properlyThe hinge of the recipe is the first stage over "a sharp fire": the tails and vegetables should colour deeply in the butter before the water goes in. A pale start gives a thin, grey soup no amount of simmering will rescue.
- Brown the tails harder than she saysTwo oxtails, cut at the joints, need to be browned in batches over high heat rather than crowded into one stewpan. Some cooks brown them in a hot oven instead.
- Cooking timeFour hours at a bare simmer is right for oxtail and should not be rushed; the connective tissue needs the time to turn to gelatin. A pressure cooker does it in about 50 minutes at high pressure, though the broth will be cloudier.
- The thickeningNo quantity is given. Around 1 oz of flour per quart of finished soup, worked into butter as a roux and whisked in, gives the light body intended. This is meant to be a soup, not a gravy.
- Chill and lift the fatOxtail throws a great deal of fat. Rather than skimming hot, cool the strained broth overnight and lift the solid cap off; the result is far cleaner than anything skimming achieves.
- Yield and servingThree quarts of water for ten or twelve is generous by modern portions and will serve eight amply as a first course, or six as a main with bread. Return the picked meat to the pot rather than whole joints if serving in soup plates.
Oxtail soup entered fashionable English cookery from a thrifty direction: the tails were a by-product of the slaughterhouse and the leather trade, and there is a long-repeated tradition -- more often asserted than documented -- linking the soup to London's Huguenot and immigrant communities before the nineteenth century made it respectable enough for a dinner table. Isabella Beeton's inclusion of it, with ham, port and ketchup, shows the familiar Victorian move of taking a cheap cut and dressing it in the seasonings of the gentleman's table. The note "seasonable in winter" was practical rather than sentimental: cattle were generally killed in greater numbers in the colder months, and a four-hour simmer was a reasonable use of a range already lit all day.