[Sca-cooks] oxtail soup

[lcm at jeffnet.org]

And
this points another likely reason why there's a paucity of "Oxtail
Soup" recipes in the 14th c corpus- the recipes we have were written
down by palace cooks, noblemen, doctors, etc. Not by peasants, who
are the ones who would have eaten oxtail soup.
 There are however lots of other soup recipes from the 14th c.
There's a very spiffy website up with webbed versions of a number of
cookbooks, as well as articles and other references. It's at:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/food.html There's six links just for 14th
c sources. I bang through this list looking for stuff fairly
frequently.
 Liutgard
 On Mon 01/24/11  5:25 AM , Johnna Holloway johnnae at mac.com sent:
 And it may not appear in the early cookery books.
  From A history of food  By Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat:
 "Oxtail soup, however, regarded as very English, could have arrived
in  
 the country with French emigres during the Revolution; Menon's La  
 cuisiniere bourgeoise of 1774 contains a recipe (p. 43) for queue en
 
 hochepot."
 OED says:
    The tail of an ox, used esp. as an ingredient in cooking. Hence  
 (more fully oxtail soup): soup made from oxtail or having a beef  
 flavouring.
 1834    H. W. Brand Simpson's Cookery v. 64   Ox-tail soup. Blanch
two  
 ox-tails, cut into pieces of a size suited to be served at table.
 1970    A. L. Simon & R. Howe Dict. Gastron. 286/1   It is said the 

 first ox-tail soup was made by a starving French nobleman during the
 
 Reign of Terror.
 Johnnae
 

Links:
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[1] http://www.pbm.com/%7Elindahl/food.html