A ramble beginning with oxtail soup
- rosemary
- 34 minutes ago
- 9 min read
"Rambling talk with an image of air." William Butler Yeats
This particular ramble began today, with a question, to which I haven't really found an answer. Well maybe. Although really it began a few days ago with a vague idea for a blog.
It wasn't going to be a ramble down highways and byways. It was just going to be a fairly simple exploration of oxtail soup - my ultimately chosen English soup in my very occasional world soup series. The usual thing - a few words about origins, a few examples with perhaps a few extreme variations. And there is that aspect of it, but also a few diversions along the way and a few discoveries. It is indeed true that you learn something every day - unimportant stuff, but something.
The opening picture above is not of oxtail soup. It's Jamie Oliver's Brown Windsor soup with pearl barley which looks pretty nice. I chose it as my opening picture because I started thinking about English soup in the middle of last week as I desperately thrashed around wondering what to write about and remembered my world soup idea. So I started looking for English soups - and even though I searched on 'English soups' - most of them were actually Scottish, and the English ones were either ones that I had covered before - The London Particular being one that I remember, soups that were really French or similar - e.g Watercress soup - or else soups that people had chosen, it seemed, as examples of the awfulness of English food - witness Brown Windsor soup.
I did a fair amount of 'research' on Brown Windsor Soup -after all my world soup tour doesn't necessarily have to be about excellent soup - and there really is quite a story about it - including the fact that it didn't really exist in the Victorian and Edwardian era, which is where we all think it originated. Not so apparently. Indeed it seems that one of the leading theories now is that it was invented in the 50s as something for comics to make jokes about. The Goons, Fawlty Towers and all that. An imaginary soup no less, for which more recent chefs have devised recipes. Canned soup manufacturers too - who probably added to the bad name. If you really want to know the whole story, you can do no better than read The Muddy History of Brown Windsor Soup by Gary Jones/BBC.
One of those chefs was Alastair Little and various bloggers have had a go. This one is from Essex Eating and they say that:
"Belying its slightly depressing, functional look, it tasted absolutely belting. Subtle at first, meaty. But then turning spicy and tinged with the sherry flavour. Bloody gorgeous. - Essex Eating
Looks, yet again, it seems are not everything.
Having abandoned Brown Windsor I thought back to my childhood and remembered Oxtail soup - which is in very many ways similar to Brown Windsor - much derided, brown, so old-fashioned and takes a long time to make. I now think that what I remember was Oxtail stew rather than soup, but then as I said the other day it's a fine line between a soup and a stew, and I remember our Oxtail stew as being a thin affair, so more like a soup.
Starting to feel a touch nostalgic and thinking that perhaps I should have a go at making it myself, I then remembered that it had been a very long while since I had seen any oxtail in the supermarkets - or butchers come to that. Which brought me to my question - why? I double-checked with Coles - who do actually have it on their website - but with the words 'currently unavailable' beside it.
Combining vague thoughts in various articles I came to the conclusion that it has something to do with the modern impulses to return nostalgically to the past, to be ethical and use everything in an animal, and to tart up the everyday dishes of everyday people. As I wrote about in my last post. As a result oxtail - instead of being the food that the poor could afford to buy because the rich thought it beneath them, is now a rarity because it's being bought up by cooks and chefs - and a cow only has one tail. Well that's what most people seem to think, although I suppose it could be the absolute opposite and it's all being ground up in pet food or fertiliser.
So much for my question. What about origin?. Ox-tail soup certainly has a clearer history than Brown Windsor, but it is not what you might have thought - which was probably along the lines of poor people have been making it since forever. Like Neil Buttery on his website British Food: a History, who tells us that:
"The recipe itself only seems to appear in the latter half of the eighteenth century and apparently came from France. I can’t believe this recipe is so recent, I imagined that we’d been eating a version of it for a millennium."
The French bit is Auguste Escoffier, whose recipe Auguste Escoffier's oxtail soup was chosen by Gordon Ramsay, no less, as his Best difficult recipe in a Guardian article, in which famous chefs had to nominate their Best difficult recipe - not their own - somebody else's. Interestingly when I found that I went searching for pictures, because the Guardian article didn't have one, and turned up an article from a website called Persephone's Kitchen whose author said of the experience of making the Escoffier recipe:
"Cooking a difficult recipe like this is for me, a lot like playing tennis with Roger Federer. You should play tennis with someone who’s much better at it than you. Otherwise, how can you expect to improve your serve? Cooking this way teaches me new things about myself as a cook. I like learning. And I learn a lot when I make a recipe like this." Persephone's Kitchen
Well I guess you have to be keen. I think she and Neil Buttery, (Oxtail soup) used the same recipe, but the results look quite different, so I'm not sure:
Difficult because of some cheffy techniques which my mother certainly wouldn't have used. But here I will digress to another aspect of difficult, and also another coincidence, in that I went looking at the end for the Michelin Star version and found one by Heston Blumenthal who calls it The Twist in the Tail, which had been tried by Becks & Posh in an amusing article entitled Why I Could Never Be a Chef. Why is it so difficult? Well the writer of Becks & Posh quotes Julian Barnes who said:
"I was cooking oxtail stew the other day and naturally, pedantically, checked a few recipes for how long to give it. Alastair Little two hours (you're joking), Fay Maschler three, Frances Bissell four (getting warmer). I think I gave it five, and two subsequent reheatings of 45 minutes each only enhanced the tail's fork-meltingness. Mr Blumenthal probably has a recipe that involves giving it the full cycle of the moon."
Our writer of Becks & Posh was really happy with the result of all that effort. However:
"the result was very rich and very tasty. In fact I would go so far as to say it was the most delicious stew I have ever eaten. But was it worth it? Was it worth the effort? Was it worth the $100+ bill? I don't quite think so. I could have happily eaten a Chef's tasting menu at Manresa for that price without even lifting a finger." Becks and Posh
And Heston himself said:
"This recipe requires some time to prepare - you need to start things in motion fully two days before serving - and a long time in the oven, but it really is worth the trouble (I know it seems as if I say something like that every week, but it's especially true of this dish). Anyway, most of the time involved is, in fact, spent waiting around"
All of which doesn't seem much like 'difficult' other than organising your time. But that's the thing about cheap cuts of meat isn't it? They're tough and so they take a long time to soften and mellow, and exude their fats into the surrounding ingredients. Which perfectly suits the 'slow cooking' movement of today.
Nigel Slater, who has his own version - Oxtail and onion soup is typical of the 'slow cooking vibe' when he says:
"There is a calming quality to oxtail, as we might expect from something that spent its life at the other end of an animal peacefully munching grass. ... A tail needs moist heat and a slow oven if it is to be tender. You need time to get the bones to do their stuff. Ideally, the meat should be so tender you could eat it with a spoon. Timing isn't especially crucial here. Half an hour extra in the oven may be the end [of] the story for a decent roast rib, but will mean little or nothing to an oxtail."
Indeed the main difficulty might just be finding the oxtail, although it does sound as if Escoffier's original recipe did actually require some more advanced technique.
At this point I decided to just look for different recipes, from the well-known, and not so well-known so herewith my picks for the relatively traditional and unsurprising versions - which is not to say they would not taste good: Oxtail soup with mini parsley dumplings - The Hairy Bikers/BBC. There is a video of this one which reminded me of how good their food is, and how I should seek out one of their books, and also what a loss the relatively recent death of Dave Myers is. Then there is Oxtail soup - Barney Desmazery/BBC Good Food; Oxtail soup - Krumpli and Oxtail soup with red wine and root vegetables - Bon Appétit/Epicurious
There were, of course, lots of other recipes, in some of which the meat had been removed from the bones and shredded before being returned to the puréed soup, and in some of which the bits of oxtail had been left intact. My mother left hers intact - there is not a lot of meat on an oxtail and many make much of eating the marrow in the middle. We did not, although it is also possible that it had melted and leaked into the soup I guess.
Then I found a couple which were a little bit more - dare I say fusion? - versions: Oxtail, silverbeet and chickpea soup with Parmesan dippers - Anthony Puharich/delicious and Yemeni oxtail soup - Yotam Ottolenghi/The Guardian which was served with zhoug (the picture is from Eat the Right Stuff)
And that last one, plus a picture search led me to discover that Oxtail soup is not really an English thing - it's a world-wide thing. It seems almost everyone has a version, although I'm just offering three different cultures here - Korean, Thai Muslim (from an Australian/Vietnamese) and Hawaiian - but there's Chinese, Mexican, Phillipino ... Easy Korean oxtail soup (KKori Komtang)/The Subversive Table; Oxtail soup (Sokkoritang) - Maangchi; Oxtail soup (soup hang wuao) - Luke Nguyen/SBS; Hawaiian oxtail soup - Elise Bauer/Simply Recipes which reflects a Chinese influence and Hawaiian oxtail soup - One Stop Halal
I doubt that my mother followed any recipe and I also think that it would have been a version similar to many housewives, in that the meat and a selection of vegetables were just put into a pot with some water and left to cook for hours. I doubt if there was any browning of the meat and some of the vegetables before the liquid was added. But it tasted good. It was one of my favourite things. A typical English kind of soup which I love to this day:
"I reckon a great soup has the power to lift my mood more than any other dish. It's partly because you can't eat a hot soup quickly – or at least you'd be a fool to try. Soup encourages you to slow down, sip, sup, savour, linger a little longer. And if that's not the perfect recipe for a great weekend, I don't know what is." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
So a bit of a ramble, coincidences, a few things learnt, a few things remembered, only to end up with my usual selection of recipes - still I wrote something and I'm not a genius:
Alas that's me, and I have to fast one day a week too, to keep me at a reasonable weight.
YEARS GONE BY
October 20
2024 - Nothing
2022 - The sugar dilemma
2021 - Sharing a COVID dinner - and wine - and here's another coincidence, the opening quote was one from Epicurus that I used the other day.
2020 - Missing
2018 - Nothing
2017 - Yuzu = citrus junos
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