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Braised Ox Joints (Cut ox tail at joints parboil)
Cut ox tail at joints, parboil five minutes, wash thoroughly, dredge with flour, and sauté in butter (to which has been added a sliced onion) until well browned. Add one-fourth cup flour, two cups each brown stock, water, and canned tomatoes, one teaspoon salt, and one-fourth teaspoon pepper. Turn into an earthen pudding-dish, cover, and cook slowly three and one-half hours. Remove ox tail, strain sauce, and return ox tail and sauce to oven to finish cooking. Add twothirds cup each carrot and turnip (shaped with a vegetable cutter in pieces one-inch long, and about as large around as macaroni) parboiled in boiled salted water five minutes. As soon as vegetables are soft, add Sherry wine to taste, and more salt and pepper, if needed. The wine may be omitted.
A standard long braise for oxtail, written for a coal range where "cook slowly" meant whatever corner of the oven ran coolest. The technique holds up entirely; only the vessel and the temperatures need translating.
- The hinge: low and longOxtail is almost all connective tissue and will be tough at any temperature until the collagen melts. The original gives no number and no oven term at all, only "cook slowly"; in a modern oven something around 300-325F suits, with the liquid at a bare tremble rather than a simmer. Three and a half hours is the recipe's own figure, and four is often better.
- Earthen pudding-dishA covered stoneware or earthenware baking dish. A heavy enameled Dutch oven does the same job and lets you brown the meat and build the sauce in one pot instead of transferring.
- Ox tailBeef oxtail, sold cut crosswise into rounds by most butchers, so the instruction to cut at the joints is usually already done. Two to three pounds suits this quantity of liquid.
- Why parboilFive minutes in boiling water and a thorough wash removes surface blood and scum, which keeps the finished sauce clear. It is not a tenderising step and does not shorten the braise.
- Brown stockFannie Farmer's brown stock takes its colour from browning part of the beef in fat before simmering, rather than from a pale simmer. Any good unsalted beef stock works; if using commercial stock, hold back some of the teaspoon of salt until the end, since the sauce reduces.
- Canned tomatoesPeriod canned tomatoes were typically whole and packed in their own juice. Whole peeled tomatoes crushed by hand are the closest match; avoid anything labelled sauce or puree.
- Strain and degreaseThe instruction to remove the meat and strain the sauce is the moment to skim, and oxtail throws a great deal of fat. Chilling the strained liquid briefly makes the fat lift off in a sheet, and the sauce will be thick with gelatin when cold, which is correct.
- The vegetable cutterCarrot and turnip cut in inch-long batons about the diameter of macaroni, as the recipe specifies, so they cook evenly and look deliberate. A small knife does this; the recipe parboils them five minutes before they go in.
- YieldProbably about four servings, judging by the quantity of liquid; the recipe gives no yield. The original adds the sherry to taste once the vegetables are soft; adding it late keeps it from cooking flat.
Oxtail is a butcher's leftover that became a delicacy by way of patience: nearly worthless as a cut, it repays a long wet cook with an unusual richness of gelatin, which is why oxtail soup was a staple of nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American kitchens long before it appeared in a cooking-school text. Its presence in the Boston Cooking-School book reflects the school's practical mission — Fannie Farmer's students were being trained to handle the cheap and the expensive with equal precision, and the fussy macaroni-sized vegetable cuts here show the period's belief that economy cookery should still look composed on the plate. The optional sherry and the strained, degreased sauce mark this as a dish aspiring upward, an English braise given a French finish, with the wine left out for households that kept none.