Oxtail soup

It must have been wet for this inspection of the Screwfix whitebeam, wet enough for me both to have carried and to have deployed by proper umbrella, assuming that is that one can call an umbrella which was probably procured from a car boot sale, proper. Which means that I must have owned it for quite a while, as it must be quite a while since I last went to a car boot sale, once a reasonably regular feature of Sunday morning life. The source, for example, of my fine atlas of the world from Britannica.

Search of the archive suggests that the last car book sale attended may have been as far back as 2018, as noticed at reference 2, the occasion, as it happens, on which I acquired my fine atlas of the world from The Times, from those far off days when the Times was still a proper newspaper. But the real work looks to have been done by Bartholomew of Edinburgh. For some reason, I had thought that the atlas came from a second hand book shop in the main drag of Bridport, probably the top end of South Street.

I also thought that Britannica might have used the services of Bartholomew too, but checking, I am reminded that the atlas came from Britannica Inc and was a strongly US affair, with very little participation from the UK, beyond that of one Brigadier Thackwell, a military cartographer who was born in and saw considerable service in India, ending up with Ordnance Survey here in the UK. Included in the list next to that which includes the Hungarian outfit Cartographia, noticed at reference 4.

A day which was clearly dreary enough to make oxtail soup a good idea for my DIY lunch, it being a Wednesday. A soup which must mainly have consisted of the liquor drained off the oxtail of reference 1, after taking the layer of fat off the top. Probably with the addition of some left over onions and stuff, passed through the blender. Brown and savoury.

It looks as if there was enough fat left to make a bit of a ring around the outside.

It so happens, that yesterday, I bought some tins of Heinz oxtail soup from Waitrose - the M&S tinned soup offering was very thin - and we had a couple of cans for lunch today. Also brown and savoury, but not as strongly flavoured as I remembered. I was also very conscious of all the tomato - either because I knew it was there or because it was not there when I was a child. Gemini had warned me that it would not be the same: '... If your memory of Heinz Oxtail Soup is markedly more pungent and intensely savoury than a tin bought today, that is not just nostalgia...'.

And the tins today do proudly proclaimed the absence of artificial colourings or flavourings, in which context tomato would have been helpful for both colour and texture.

Furthermore, BH had thought to take a look at what the Radiation cook book had to say about oxtail soup. Not that different from what I did - nor indeed so very different from what Heinz did. Its not the meat you want in the soup, its all the flavoursome stuff you get from boiling up the bones. Flavoursome stuff which you might well enhance with both salt and MSG.

I notice also that Radiation enhance with both ham or bacon and stock (of unknown provenance).

PS: I should say that while we do eat bacon and other preserved pork products, that apart, we add very little to our diet. I put a little in bread and that is about it.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/10/oxtail.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/bank-holiday.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/01/peg-it.html. Aide-memoire.

Reference 4: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/another-hot-morning.html.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate. MSG. For that authentic, umami taste of Japan.

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