Ox-Tail Soup
This is an inexpensive and good soup: two ox-tails; four quarts of water; one bouquet soup greens; one onion (sliced); two carrots; one stalk of celery; two sprigs of parsley; one slice of pork; three cloves; salt and pepper to suit. Wash and unjoint the tails, and crack the bones, if possible. Slice the vegetables, and, mincing the pork, place it in a stewpan to heat. When hot, add the onion to brown. Fry the tails also in this fat for a short time, and place them in the soup-kettle with the water. Simmer four hours, add the other vegetables, and when these are very tender, the soup has cooked sufficiently. Now strain the soup, and having chosen a number of the joints, one for each plate, trim them nicely and set the whole away. The next day remove the fat from the soup, season with salt, pepper, and catsup or worcestershire sauce, as preferred, and return the joints saved for the purpose.
A two-day soup that gains from the pause: the overnight chill is what lets you lift the fat off cleanly, and oxtail throws a great deal of it. Plan accordingly rather than trying to finish in one session.
- The hinge: chill overnightThe recipe strains, saves a few joints, and stops. That is deliberate — oxtail fat sets hard on the surface when cold and lifts off in a sheet. Skimming a hot pot leaves the soup greasy and dulls the seasoning you add at the end.
- Oxtail and the butcherModern oxtail comes pre-cut at the joints, so "unjoint the tails" is usually done for you. Two tails will run roughly 4 to 6 lb depending on size. Cracking the bones matters less with pieces that have already been cut, though a joint cut is not the same as a sawn bone.
- "One bouquet soup greens"A tied bundle of pot herbs sold by nineteenth-century greengrocers — typically leek, parsley, thyme, a bay leaf, sometimes a turnip or parsnip scrap. A standard bouquet garni plus a leek covers it; note it duplicates the loose parsley and celery listed separately, which is fine.
- "One slice of pork"Salt pork or unsmoked fat back, about 2 oz, used purely as the frying medium. Diced bacon works, though it brings smoke the original did not intend. Two tablespoons of oil is a fair substitute if you skip the pork.
- Browning matters more than the book saysFour quarts of water against 4 to 6 lb of meat is still a thin ratio, so colour and fond do most of the flavour work. Brown the oxtail in batches until it is genuinely dark, and deglaze the pan into the kettle.
- Timing the vegetablesFour hours at a bare simmer suits the oxtail. Sliced carrot and celery added at that point will be "very tender" in 30 to 40 minutes; they are strained out anyway, so there is no reason to add them earlier and cook them to nothing.
- ReducingFour quarts is a large volume for this quantity of meat, and the original never says to reduce. After straining, boil the liquid down by a third or so before chilling; the finished soup should have body from the collagen in the tails.
- Catsup at the end"Catsup" in this period could still mean mushroom or walnut catsup — thin, dark, salty, closer to Worcestershire than to tomato ketchup — though tomato catsup was also widely sold by this date. Worcestershire, or a spoonful of mushroom ketchup if you have it, gives the intended savoury edge.
- YieldRoughly 2½ quarts after reduction, enough for six to eight, with one trimmed joint set in each bowl as the recipe directs.
Oxtail soup was a thrift dish that became a restaurant fixture, which is why a book like this can call it "inexpensive and good" without embarrassment — the tail was a butcher's offcut, cheap because it was mostly bone and connective tissue, and long simmering turns that tissue into exactly the gelatine a clear soup wants. English cookery books had been printing it since the early nineteenth century, and it is often traced to French refugee butchers in London who bought up hides for tanning and made use of the tails; that account is traditional rather than documented. By the time Butterick issued its cook book at the turn of the twentieth century, oxtail soup had crossed into the middle-class American repertoire and was also sold canned. The two-day method here reflects a kitchen without refrigeration as we know it: the pot would have been set in a cool larder overnight, and the cook's morning task was lifting off the cake of hardened fat, which was likely saved for frying rather than thrown away.