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Boiled Ox-Tails
Put two dozen small onions into a saucepan with three pints of water and boil for about twenty minutes. Cut two ox-tails into pieces, put them into a saucepan with a large lump of butter and a large onion; brown, then pour in the water from the boiled onions, adding more water if necessary to cover them. Add of each two or three carrots and turnips cut in small pieces, putting in the carrots about twenty minutes before the turnips. Boil slowly, and when the tails and vegetables are done take them out and keep hot on a dish. Put an ounce of butter in another pan, melt it, and stir in flour enough to make it quite stiff, pour in the strained gravy from the tails, adding a little at a time, and stir well till it boils. Place the pieces of tails in the center of the dish, arrange the vegetables around them, pour over the sauce, and serve with the boiled onions for a garnish.
A straightforward braise dressed up as a boil. The recipe gives no times for the meat itself, which is the one thing a modern cook needs to know.
- Cook the tails long enoughOxtail is almost entirely connective tissue and needs two and a half to three hours at a bare simmer before it yields. "Boil slowly" here means the barest tremble on the surface; a rolling boil will leave the meat stringy and the broth cloudy.
- Buy the tail already cutTwo oxtails is roughly 4 to 6 lb, depending on size. Ask the butcher to saw them into 1½- to 2-inch sections at the joints; cutting them at home is hard work even at the joints.
- Brown properlyThe instruction to "brown" in butter is the whole flavour base. Work in batches over medium-high heat so the pieces sear rather than steam, and let the fond build in the pan before the onion water goes in.
- Vegetable timingCarrots twenty minutes ahead of turnips is right in principle, but both should go in only for the last 30 to 40 minutes of the meat's cooking, not at the start, or they will disintegrate.
- The small onionsTwo dozen small onions most likely means pearl or pickling onions, boiled separately so they stay whole for the garnish. Twenty minutes will overcook modern pearl onions; 8 to 10 minutes is enough, and their cooking water still does its job as the braising liquid.
- The rouxAn ounce of butter with "flour enough to make it quite stiff" works out to roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour. Cook it a minute or two before adding liquid, and add the strained braising stock in small additions to keep it smooth.
- Skim the fatOxtail throws a great deal of fat and the recipe never says to remove it. Strain the liquid and skim, or chill it briefly, before making the sauce, or the gravy will break greasily over the meat.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course. Better still made a day ahead: the fat lifts off solid and the meat improves overnight.
Oxtail was cheap meat with an expensive reputation, and both facts are visible here. It sold for very little through the nineteenth century, yet its gelatin makes a broth richer than almost any prime cut — which is why oxtail soup appears on grand hotel menus alongside consommés costing many times as much to produce. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his book in 1896, when a New York hotel kitchen was still working in a broadly French idiom: the browning in butter, the carrot and turnip, the flour-and-butter liaison at the end are all standard bourgeois French method, dressed here in the plain English word "boiled."