Oxtail Soup
1 oxtail. 1 lb. lean beef. 4 carrots. 3 onions. 4 qts. of water. Thyme, parsley, pepper and salt.
Cut tail at joints. Fry brown in good fat. Fry onion and two carrots sliced in drippings. Put all in soup kettle with water and beef cut in pieces. Grate the other carrots over them. Cook slowly for four hours. Thicken with brown flour mixed with a little water. Strain and serve with crisp crackers.
A long-simmered brown stock soup that needs little translation, though a few of its assumptions are worth naming.
- The hinge: brown everything properlyMuch of the colour and depth of this soup comes from the initial frying of the oxtail joints and the sliced onion and carrot. Take the pieces to a deep mahogany in the fat, not merely golden, and deglaze the pan with a little of the water so nothing is left behind.
- "Good fat" and drippingsBeef drippings or lard was assumed. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat works; beef fat gives the closest result to what Mrs. Wilson intended.
- Oxtail todayOxtail is usually sold already cut into sections and priced by weight rather than as a whole tail. Buy 2 to 3 lb of cut sections and you can skip the instruction to cut at the joints, which is awkward work with a home knife.
- Four quarts is a great deal of liquidSixteen cups reduces substantially over four hours, which is the point, but use a wide pot at a bare simmer rather than a boil. If you cover tightly you will end up with thin soup; leave the lid ajar.
- Brown flourThis means flour dry-toasted in a pan or a slow oven until nut-coloured, a standard pantry preparation of the period. It thickens less than raw flour but adds roasted flavour. Start with 2 to 3 tablespoons slaked in cold water.
- Strain, then decideStraining as written leaves the meat behind, in the older fashion for a strained brown soup. Many cooks now pick the oxtail meat off the bones and return it to the strained broth.
- Skim the fatOxtail renders a lot of fat. Chill the strained soup and lift the solid cap, or blot the surface while hot; the recipe does not mention it.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 to 3 quarts after reduction, serving six to eight as a first course.
Oxtail soup entered English and American cookery as a thrift dish that became a luxury one: the tail was a butcher's offcut, but the long cooking it demands and the rich gelatinous broth it yields made it a fixture on hotel and club menus through the nineteenth century, sometimes in a clear version and a thick version on the same card. Mrs. Wilson published this book in 1920, when she was writing for households still shaped by wartime food conservation, and a soup that turns a cheap bony cut plus a pound of beef into three quarts of dinner sits comfortably alongside the kind of economy she is generally associated with in her newspaper columns. The toasted "brown flour" thickening belongs to the same frugal tradition, made ahead in quantity and kept in a jar, ready to darken gravies and soups without the cost of extra meat glaze.