Ox-Tail Soup
1 ox-tail 1/2 tablespoon drippings 2 quarts cold water 1 onion 1 teaspoon salt 1 stalk celery 1 bunch parsley 2 cloves 2 peppercorns Cut ox-tail into pieces, separating at the joints. Brown the onion in the drippings of salt pork. Put the meat in a kettle with the water; when it reaches the boiling point add the spices, the onion and the celery and parsley finely chopped. Let simmer for four hours; strain and cool and remove the grease. Reheat; add the salt and serve. 3 pounds tripe 2 quarts water
A plain long-simmered broth in the loose-leaf style: the ingredient column and the method were set separately, and the transcription shows it. Read the list and the paragraph together before you start.
- The missing ingredientNo quantity of ox-tail appears in the list, though the method calls for it. One whole tail, jointed -- commonly anywhere from 2 to 4 lb -- suits 2 quarts of water. Ask the butcher to cut it at the joints if you would rather not do it yourself.
- The stray line at the end"3 pounds tripe 2 quarts water" belongs to the next recipe, not to this one. Ignore it.
- DrippingsRendered fat saved from cooking salt pork. Bacon fat is the closest everyday substitute; plain oil or butter will do, though you lose a little of the cured-pork background.
- Brown the tail tooThe instruction browns only the onion. Searing the tail pieces hard in the same fat before they go into the water is what gives ox-tail broth its colour and depth, and it costs ten minutes.
- Cold water startStarting in cold water and bringing it up slowly draws out gelatin and lets scum rise where you can skim it. Keep the pot at a bare tremble for the full four hours rather than a rolling boil, which emulsifies the fat back into the liquid.
- Whole spices in the strainTwo cloves and two peppercorns is a very light hand by modern taste. They come out at the straining anyway, so a small muslin bag or a tea ball saves fishing.
- Cool and lift the fatOx-tail throws a great deal of fat. Chilling the strained broth lets it set into a cap you can lift off whole; the recipe says only "strain and cool", so use the refrigerator.
- Salt lastSalt goes in at the reheat because four hours of reduction concentrates whatever you added at the start. One teaspoon for 2 quarts will taste thin to most people now; season to your own palate at the end.
- The meatStrained as written, this is a clear broth and the meat is discarded. Picking the meat from the bones and returning it to the reheated broth makes it a supper rather than a first course. Serves four to six as a starter.
Ox-tail was cheap meat, and cookbooks of this period put it in the soup chapter for exactly that reason: a bony, gelatinous cut that the long, unattended simmer of a coal or wood range turned into something rich. Its reputation in English and American cookery is often said to derive from the trade in hides, where the tails were a by-product of the tanneries and sold off separately, though this is tradition rather than documented fact; ox-tail soup was in any case a standard of nineteenth-century chophouses. This version is thrift cookery of the plainest sort, down to the half tablespoon of saved salt-pork fat used to brown the onion.