“With one  spoonful of her ox-tail soup Tita instantly recalls the best time of her life, her youth in the  kitchen with Nacha, where she enjoyed many foods and Nacha’s love. Crying with  Chencha, Tita remembers and recounts the recipe for the soup–the first recipe  she has been able to remember since her breakdown.”  Like Water for Chocolate.

Buy two pounds of oxtail, that has been cut into about 2 inch pieces.

Brown the ox tail pieces in a skillet with several tablespoons of oil, until brown.

Put browned ox tail pieces in a soup pot, with chopped onion or leek.  Add cloves if desired.  add water to cover meat.

Cover pot tightly.  Bring to a boil. Simmer for 3 hours.

Take out oxtail pieces and chill, chill the stock overnight. Remove fat and reserve. Strain stock to remove onion and cloves if added.

Chop veggies in small size pieces.

Saute remaining vegetables in skillet with some of the reserved fat. For a lighter version, use a small amount of olive oil. Add stock and lemon slice and bring to a boil, then simmer 20-30 minutes.

Remove the oxtail meat from the bones and reserve. Remove lemon slice and add tomato and oxtail pieces, simmer for 20-30 additional minutes. Makes 2 ½ quarts.

This is an incredibly simple and delicious recipe from 1867 and you likely have all the needed ingredients in your house.  Here is how you make lemon pudding as found in The Family Save-All published in 1867.

———————————————————————————————————————————————

Soften butter and mix with sugar until creamy.

Grate lemon rind and squeeze juice (1 lemon).

Crack and whisk five eggs.

Mix eggs into butter/sugar mixture. Then mix in lemon juice and rind.

Pour mixture into pie tin. Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 30 minutes.

Let stand for approximately 30 minutes before cutting pie.

After completing our second recipe, I have to disagree with Julie Powell.   Yes, Julie, you can have too much butter!  Our  Apple Charlotte was  practically inedible due to butter overload.

Observations:

When using a recipe from 1836  the  ingredient amounts are not specific.   The chef must use common sense when preparing the dish.   In hindsight, our common sense should have kicked in when we were melting our third stick of butter for use in this recipe.

Perhaps instead of soaking each layer of bread in butter, we could have  drizzled a little butter on the bread layers.

We were originally going to follow the spunge-cake version of this recipe.   We decided to use the bread version instead. Not entirely sure if the spunge-cake version would have tasted better, but I have a feeling it may have.

Taken from page 99 in Domestic French Cookery published in 1836.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————

We selected 4 crisp Granny Smith apples which we peeled and pared.

One stick of melted butter was blended with ½ cup sugar and lemon zest and teaspoon of cinnamon.

Apples were combined with melted butter / sugar / cinnamon mix.

Apple mix was baked uncovered in 350 degree oven for ½ hour.

After baking, the apple mix was smashed using a fork.

Sliced two loaves of bread and removed the crust.

The bread was dipped in butter prior to layering in pan.  We started with a layer of bread on the bottom and then added 1/2 of apple mix.

 The top layer is bread dipped in butter.

Bake in 350 degree oven for 30 minutes – last 5 minutes oven was set to broil.