Oxtail Soup
(England.) This recipe and the one above were brought by French refugees who had learned, during exile and enforced poverty, how to make the best of their resources. Cut 3 oxtails into pieces and steep them in water for 2 hours. Drain them, fry in 2 ounces of butter or suet, add salt, pepper, 2 carrots, 1 leek, 1 onion, a piece of celery, 1 clove, and some parsley. Simmer 3 hours, remove the bones, and put the meat into the soup, add 6 small white onions, fried in butter until tender, and serve with croutons.
CALF'S HEAD SOUP. (Recipe of the Hotel Star and Garter, Richmond, England.) Parboil and bone a calf's head. Put the bones and the meat, cut up, in 4 quarts of water with 1 ounce of flour, salt, pepper, a bayleaf, some parsley, a clove, 1 carrot, and 1 onion. Cook 4 hours, take out the bones, cut the meat into dice, strain the soup, add the meat, 3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced, 1 dozen poached forcemeat balls, made of some meat, bread-crumbs, herbs, and egg, 1 glass of sherry and 1 lemon, cut in slices. Serve at once, hot. BATTENBERG SOUP (as made at Windsor.).
Cook 1 calf's foot, 3 pounds of soup beef, 3 carrots, 3 onions, 2 cloves, a piece of celery, parsley, and thyme, in 3 1/2 quarts of water for 4 hours. Take out the meat, remove the bones, put the meat, cut up, back in the soup, and set aside until next day. Skim off the fat--clarify it, as directed for frying or braising--strain the soup, add sufficient flour and butter to thicken it, the meat, 1 glass of sherry, salt, pepper, and 1 cup of hot cream.
Three related brown soups run together on one page. The oxtail recipe is the only one most cooks will attempt today; all three depend on long, slow extraction from bone and connective tissue.
- The missing measurementThe oxtail recipe gives no quantity of liquid, moving straight from frying to a three-hour simmer. Cover the browned pieces and vegetables by an inch or two and top up as it reduces; three tails will want roughly 3 to 4 quarts.
- Three oxtails is a lotOne oxtail today runs 2 to 3 lb cut into segments, so three tails is 6 to 9 lb of meat and bone — a stockpot-sized batch feeding ten or more. Halving it is sensible for a household.
- Steeping in waterThe two-hour soak is there to draw out blood and give a clearer soup, a standard step before refrigeration. It is optional now, but it does produce noticeably less scum.
- Three hours is the minimumOxtail is rich in collagen and connective tissue. Simmer until the meat slips from the bone with no resistance — often 3 1/2 to 4 hours at a bare tremble. Boiling hard will cloud the broth and toughen the meat before it turns.
- Suet and the fat capBeef suet is still sold by butchers and renders cleanly for the initial browning; butter works but scorches sooner. Oxtail throws a great deal of fat, so chill the finished soup and lift the solid cap before reheating.
- Calf's head, plainlyThe second recipe needs a whole scalded calf's head, which is a special order from a butcher and not a supermarket item. The recipe does not say how long to parboil; ten to fifteen minutes' blanching, drained and the water discarded, is the usual reading before the four-hour cook.
- Forcemeat balls"Some meat" means scraps from the head or any lean veal, minced with breadcrumbs, herbs and egg. Poach them separately in a little of the strained broth so they do not break up and muddy the soup.
- Battenberg soup, held overnightSetting the pot aside until next day is for skimming the set fat and is only safe if the soup is cooled quickly and refrigerated, not left in a cold larder. Bring it back to a full simmer before adding the flour-and-butter thickening, and stir in the cream off the boil so it does not split.
- Sherry and lemon at the endThe glass of sherry — somewhere between 2 and 4 fluid ounces, depending on what the compiler meant by a glass — goes in at the finish in both of the later soups; long cooking would drive off everything it contributes. The lemon slices likewise go in at the end rather than being simmered.
The headnote's claim that these soups came to England with French refugees who "had learned, during exile and enforced poverty, how to make the best of their resources" is the standard nineteenth-century story attached to oxtail soup — told variously of Huguenot refugees of the 1680s and of emigres of the 1790s — and it is repeated far more often than it is documented; oxtail was cheap butcher's offal long before either date, and the tale that the tails were sold off by tanners who wanted the hides is itself part of the same folklore. What is certain is that by the time this book was compiled, oxtail soup had become thoroughly English and thoroughly respectable, appearing on club and hotel menus beside the turtle and the mock turtle. The two recipes following it are attributed to institutions rather than cooks: the Star and Garter at Richmond, a Thames-side hotel famous for grand dinners, and Windsor, whose "Battenberg" name belongs to the period when German-derived titles were freely borrowed for dishes served at court. All three belong to a kitchen where a calf's foot or a whole head was a cheap source of the gelatine that gave soup body, a job now done by a carton of stock or a spoon of thickening.