When you think about the days of yore (at least the American ones), you tend to picture horses and donkeys being the main drivers of farm work; the colloquial term is "workhorse" for a reason. However, in colonial America, the real beasts of burden were oxen. They were far more inexpensive than owning and caring for horses, and bonus, when the animal reached the end of its use in the field, it headed for the kitchen.
Ox meat can be very tough, but early cooks discovered that simmering the tail released the meat from the bones effectively, and it made for a hearty, cost-effective stew. Nowadays, oxtail stew is a perennial favorite in soul food cuisine, becoming an important milestone in the African American experience. After all, let's not kid ourselves about who was being tasked with the cooking in the southern colonies.
For most of the Bites in this project, I either eat/drink them in a restaurant, or prepare them myself. This was a fun exception, as I was hanging out with some friends of mine, and was invited to dinner at their place, where oxtail stew was already simmering on the stove. It was served over a heaping mound of polenta, and was delicious. It's certainly not hard to understand why this dish has endured for hundreds of years.
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