Ox-tail Soup
1 small ox-tail. 6 cups Brown Stock Carrot½ cup each, cut in Turnip fancy shapes Onion½ cup each, cut in Celery small pieces s 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1/4 cup Madeira wine 1 teaspoon Worcestershire 1 teaspoon lemon juice.
This is a garnished clear soup rather than a long-simmered stew, and the printed text is a compressed ingredient table that has run together in transcription. Read it as: 6 cups brown stock; 1/2 cup each carrot and turnip cut in fancy shapes; 1/2 cup each onion and celery cut in small pieces; 1/2 teaspoon salt; a few grains cayenne; 1/4 cup Madeira; 1 teaspoon Worcestershire.
- The oxtail is in the stockThe oxtail is presumably in the stock -- Farmer's Brown Stock is a separate recipe elsewhere in the book, and the printed text here says nothing about the tail at all, so the tail must be assumed to go into the stock (Farmer's own Brown Stock is made with shin of beef). To make it as oxtail soup: buy 2-3 lb of oxtail, joint it, brown it hard, and simmer 3-4 hours until the meat slips from the bone. Strain, chill, and lift the fat before you go further.
- Save the meatThe recipe as printed says nothing about it, but the picked meat from the tail belongs back in the bowl. Cut it into neat pieces and warm it in the finished soup.
- Fancy shapesCarrot and turnip were cut with small vegetable cutters into rounds, crescents, diamonds or stars, a standard garnish of the period. Small dice does the same job. Cook the shapes separately in salted water until just tender rather than in the soup, which keeps the broth clear.
- Onion and celeryThe smaller cut suggests these were meant to disappear into the flavour, with the carrot and turnip as the visual element. Simmer the onion and celery in the stock and strain them out if you want a fully clear soup.
- Madeira lastAdd the wine off the heat or in the last minute. Boiling drives off the aromatics that are the whole reason it is there. A dry or medium Sercial or Verdelho suits it better than a sweet Malmsey.
- Worcestershire and cayenneA teaspoon of Worcestershire in six cups is a background note, not a flavour you should identify. "Few grains cayenne" is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon or less; the soup should warm rather than sting.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon assumes an unsalted homemade stock. If you are using commercial broth, taste before adding any at all.
- YieldSix cups serves six as a first course in the small cups the period used, or four as a modern bowl.
Ox-tail soup came to American cookbooks from England, where the tail was cheap butcher's offal that repaid long cooking with unusually rich, gelatinous stock, and it was well established on nineteenth-century hotel and restaurant menus on both sides of the Atlantic. Farmer's treatment is the refined version: rather than a thick, meaty stew, the tail appears in a clear brown-stock soup, served with cut vegetables and a lift of Madeira and Worcestershire, in the manner of a consommé. Such a soup, lightly garnished, fortified with a spoonful of wine at the last moment, was the standard opening course for a formal meal in her day, and the book's soup chapter is full of variations on the same brown stock. The tail itself has since gone from the cheapest cut on the carcass to one that a butcher may need to order for you.