Oxtail soup.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson & CM Cordeiro 2019
It was during the 1980s that Singapore saw a number of restaurants that served European styled food using recipes from France and Germany that I was introduced to a tomato based oxtail soup. My mother at the time was working for a German company with its Asia-Pacific headquarters located in Singapore. It was those years that we had the opportunity to try classic German goulash served with large chunks of meat, as well as oxtail soup. Soups in the restaurants were served together with heavy grained breads, and that’s how I have oxtail soup today as well.
There are numerous recipes on the internet today for oxtail soup. This one from Jamie Oliver’s website is pretty close to the recipe my mother had used for our own home cooking, and for the one we just cooked over this weekend:
Ingredients
2.5 kg oxtail
olive oil
2 medium leeks
2 sticks of celery
4 medium carrots
a few sprigs of fresh thyme
a few sprigs of fresh rosemary
4 fresh bay leaves
4 cloves
2 heaped tablespoons plain flour
2 x 400 g tins of plum tomatoes
275 ml porter or red wine
Worcestershire sauce
Chef de cuisine for this oxtail soup is JE Nilsson. It’s a fantastic soup served.
Something for both the soup, and the chef de cuisine from Château Larrivet Haut Brion, Bordeaux, France.
Summer harvest. Parsley, thyme, bay leaves, rosemary and lovage, picked from the garden.