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Ox Tail Soup
Miss Brokovski.
Take two ox tails and two whole onions, two carrots, a small turnip, two tablespoonfuls of flour, and a little white pepper, add a gallon of water, let all boil for two hours; then take out the tails and cut the meat into small pieces, return the bones to the pot, for a short time, boil for another hour, then strain the soup, and rince two spoonfuls of arrowroot to add to it with the meat cut from the bones, and let all boil for a quarter of an hour.
A plain Victorian oxtail broth thickened at the end with arrowroot. The method is sound, but the instructions leave out salt, skimming and any real guidance on the flour.
- Buy enough tailTwo oxtails means roughly 4-5 lb of bone-heavy meat, usually sold cut into segments. Ask the butcher for the thicker upper joints; the thin tips are mostly bone and gristle.
- The flour is unexplainedThe recipe never says what to do with the two tablespoons of flour; read literally it would simply go into the pot with the rest before the water. Period recipes commonly either dredge the tail pieces and brown them before adding water, or work the flour into fat as a roux. Browning the meat first is the version worth following, since it is where the colour and depth of an oxtail soup come from.
- Timing is short for oxtailThree hours total is the minimum. Oxtail collagen wants 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer before the meat slips from the bone; rushing it at a rolling boil gives cloudy stock and tough meat. A pressure cooker does the same work in about 45 minutes.
- Skim the fatOxtail throws a great deal of fat, and the original says nothing about removing it. Easiest is to cook the soup a day ahead, chill it, and lift the solid cap off before the final thickening.
- Vegetables go in lateOnions, carrot and turnip boiled for three hours disintegrate into the broth. Simmer them with the meat for flavour if you like, but add a fresh diced carrot and turnip in the last 25 minutes if you want them recognisable in the bowl.
- "Rince two spoonfuls of arrowroot""Rince" here means to slake the arrowroot smooth in a little cold water before adding it, the same as a cornflour slurry. Arrowroot sets almost at once and thins again if boiled hard, so the final quarter-hour boil should be a gentle simmer, or the soup will go watery.
- Season at the endNo salt is listed, which is typical of recipes written when cooks were assumed to salt by taste. Season only after the stock has reduced, or a gallon boiled down for three hours will come out too salty.
- YieldA gallon of water reduces to roughly 3 quarts, enough for 8 servings as a first course, 6 as a supper dish.
Oxtail was a cheap cut in the nineteenth century, the sort of thing sold off after the more prized joints had gone, and its high proportion of bone and connective tissue made it exactly right for long-boiled soups that set to jelly when cold. British oxtail soup is often said to have begun with the tanning and slaughtering trades of eighteenth-century London, where hides were sold to leather-dressers and the tails, having no value to them, went to the poorer kitchens nearby; French Huguenot refugee cooks in Spitalfields are sometimes credited with turning the cut into a proper soup, though both stories are lore rather than documented history. The arrowroot finish is a period marker in itself: arrowroot was the fashionable clear thickener of the era, prized because it left a soup glossy and translucent where flour would have clouded it.