Oxtail Stew
"I don't like the term stew, it sounds like it's all gone on a little too long" - Jennifer Paterson
Isn’t zeitgeist a wonderfully mysterious beast? One of my favourite cookbooks is a book written by the Irish novelist, Molly Keane, which appears whimsical at first, but couldn’t be further from it. Titled, Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking, it does exactly what it says on the cover, although the breadth and variety of the dishes within would rouse even today's worldwise little weaners. As she details in the preface, Mrs Keane believed, ‘to be acceptable, children’s food should be varied, a little startling, and pretty enough to please the eye...’, advice that I would not limit to cooking for children. I plan to write a little more about this book in the coming weeks, but the point, for now, is that a recent flick through the book looking for something else entirely, reminded me of the primacy of oxtail. In fact, this stumbling across the recipe, coupled no doubt with the current morning frosts outside my bathroom window, inspired in me an unshakeable desire to cook with it.
Fast forward 12 hours and there I was in the queue at the butcher’s, about to purchase my couple of kilos of oxtail, when I open up the nefarious socials only to see Austin of Terry’s Cafe (a man I consider henceforth to be my spirit animal) going hell for leather on a ‘proper old school’ beef stew on his Instagram stories. Oxtail secured and back at the laptop an hour or so later, and, all the way over the other side of the pond (as Austin would no doubt call it,) Kenji Lopez Alt is waxing scientific about umami, browning, Maillard reaction, et al, as he cooks, yup, you guessed it, an old school beef stew. And there was me thinking that devoting a newsletter to the much-maligned Ox in the current climate would be an act of almost punk-like radicalism. Not a word of it, the world is, somehow, spiritually aligned in craving something soft, rich and bovine, even when the arguments against it are mounting and somewhat compelling.
A very quick word on those arguments. It is belligerent to ignore the hard facts. We should eat less meat. We should also avoid almost all air travel and try not to have so many children. Almost anything intensively farmed is troublesome, and anyone still eating avocados should take a long hard look at themselves. My experience of rolling around in these arguments with anyone even half evangelical is that what constitutes environmental saintliness for one person is anathema to another and visa versa. We should all do more than we do currently, and yet one chap in Hull doing Veganuary is not going to turn the tide of our being structurally welded, the world over, to fossil fuels. So let's eat more seasonal vegetables, buy sustainable fish, only buy ethically produced British meat, and where we can, buy the weird cuts of meat when we do eat it as they are relatively cheap (I paid £9.99 per kg for my oxtail, and will feed four adults and one little nipper from it, plus a couple of things with the leftovers, which doesn’t seem too bad,) and don’t get used as much as they should, thus increasing the net negative impact of the chap shovelling only rib eye and rump into his orifice each night. Preach.
Back to it, then. Molly Keane’s Oxtail stew recipe is based on a pleasingly traditional method. Bacon and dripping, carrots and celery, the browning of the oxtail, then the stewing, and finally, button mushrooms browned in butter tossed in at the end. Enticing as it all sounds, though, I have no personal history with stews of this kind. There were occasional beef stews served up at my grandmother’s table, but they tended towards greyness, the beef not having had the benefit of any browning nor long luxuriant cooking. That it was then served, in my memory at least, with steamed red cabbage and a plain unseasoned boiled potato, meant the whole escapade had been filed a long way away from nostalgia in my hippocampus. This must though be understood in direct comparison with the fact that, in her household, there were only two options of tinned soup I recall being offered - Heinz Oxtail or Heinz Mulligatawny, and I never questioned this. I adored both, and it is only as an adult that I find myself confused as to how the same person could purchase and repeatedly serve an (admittedly tinned and commodified) soup based on a long slow cook of a thing, and then make a Horlicks of that same thing when cooking it from scratch for themselves. I lie, on reflection, there were three soups. They always had tins of cream of chicken or cream of mushroom, but these were seemingly reserved for pouring over chicken thighs, or similar, for tray bakes, so they were, physically and mentally, stored in a different place. If we were eating soup, it was Oxtail or Mulligatawny. Only later in life did I learn that tomato soup and others existed, and might have been the more popular choice.
All of this is not to say I haven’t accumulated positive memories of beef stew since then. Living in Ladbroke Grove almost two decades ago, I became particularly enamoured by Jamaican oxtail stew, plantain and hard food, but this was always eaten out, I haven’t cooked much of it myself. So, having read through Molly Keane, taken a peek at Leith’s bible, spent a bit of time with Austin and then with Kenji and Island Vibe Cooking on YouTube, I thought I was ready to have a run at making my own version of an Oxtail stew.
I still had a nagging feeling though. I didn’t feel I had my own personal way into the recipe. I could cook it, it would likely be delicious, and then that would be it. And that might be enough. Of course it would. Yet I wanted a narrative that pleased me, something with lasting relevance. It was in this malaise that I found myself reading an excerpt from Stanley Tucci’s wonderful memoir, Taste, and his essay on Italian-American Sunday gravy - the long slow braising of meats in a tomato sauce that goes on to be used as a primi, secondi, and no doubt as future leftovers after that. There it was. A reason to take a cheap-ish cut of underused meat, lavish it with care and attention, then cook it for 3 hours. Multiple applications. By increasing the liquid that the meat braises in you get an embarrassment of rich beefy sauce with which to strike out into other dishes. Oxtail soup for one. An otherworldly tomato pasta for another. The oxtail itself, of course, which I served with mashed potato and some grilled lettuce. And, after all of that, there was some leftover oxtail meat and a little sauce which I mixed into the leftover potato, tossed in flour, egg and bread crumbs, and then shallow fried to give the most delicious little croquettes (there were even a few of these left over, and they found their final resting place in a white floury bap with English mustard and some watercress.)
We see, hear and read so many epithets with regard to food in the UK today, how it’s so enlightened and broad and drawn from the global arena, yada, yada, and yet, watch a cookery show or read a recipe book from the ’70s or ’80s or ’90s; Molly Keane, for one, or take the Two Fat Ladies, for another; and the casual breadth of what they cook, the assumed knowledge and skill-base of the audience to whom they talk, the breezy ease with which they source, use and talk about local, seasonal and diverse ingredients, suggests we haven’t come nearly half as far as we think. Not culinarily anyway. You could write up a menu taken from Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking, or from any season of the Two Fat Ladies television shows, and pin it under a picture lamp outside Cafe Cecilia, Cafe Deco, or any number of thrusting London restaurants and Eater would be running laps of London to break the exclusive on the wave of new modern, Modern British cuisine. Even then, one dish would doubtless be left off the menu, oxtail stew. All the better for savouring it at home once a year, I say.
The recipes:
Below is the recipe for the oxtail stew I ended up making. I also include an addendum for the Oxtail soup and for the simple pasta sauce. See how far you can stretch your stew. The croquettes were a triumph, and I would be keen to know how else people might use up a surfeit of something as delicious as this.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Cartouche to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.