In my house, bums/arses/backsides/rears are valued high. So it should not have come as a surprise when having cooked a cow’s bum – the tail, to be precise – we found the taste and texture very much to our liking.

There was something primal, almost cannibalistic about eating meat of a creature’s tailbone.

The oxtail: meat and bones.

Ox tail is in fact a cow’s coccyx– in case, like J, you weren’t sure about its exact body part location. The tail is long, both muscly and bony (imagine a spine, how it is sectioned off into discs). You eat the top bit, where the tail is connected to the cow’s..mmm…bum, hence my naming of it as a kopchik, Russian for a coccyx. The tail is always sold already cut into sections, disc by disc, I suppose so that not to terrify punters by its real tail-like appearance.

The tail in the pictures has recently been ordered from Rother Valley Organics in Sussex (previously mentioned) and so it had enjoyed a lot of exercise in shish-ing flies attracted by green grass and open pastures full of dung. This is a tail of an ox who’s had a long tale (Saturday morning puns, sorry!)

There is something both comforting and hair-raising in flaking off strands of meat from cavities of each bone, and then sucking out the left-over bone-marrow from inside each disc. You feel like a caveman who’s just hunted his prey and now greedily eating up every bit of it. Admittedly, this particular tail has been cooked for good four hours, but I believe the tail, with its curveous contours and hidden juices, can not compete with the boringly expensive fillet-slicing or common roast. Even though oxtail is often sold as offal, the flavour is not at all gamey and a lot more traditional, if you like. Because of all the bone marrow inside (which is the most delicate type of fat in a cow), when the whole thing is cooked long and slow, the result in tender and almost sweet.

Arse is definitely best.

I used the recipe from my favourite ‘Fat’ by Jennifer McLagan, slightly adjusted of course (where would we be without a healthy dose of individualism?)

Kopchik s apelsinami, or a braised oxtail:

Note: this recipe takes 2 days to make, but only about 15 mins of attention on the actual preparation.

serves 3-4

1.3 kg oxtail, cut into pieces

2-3 tbs of beef dripping (or oil or butter, but dripping is so much better)

2 onions, chopped

2 carrots, sliced

1/2 orange, zest an juice

200 ml red wine

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

squirt of tomato paste

2 bay leaves

1 tsp of toasted cumin

1 clove

1/2 star anise

1. pre-heat the oven to 150 C. Season each oxtail piece with salt and pepper, brown off in beef dripping on a medium heat, in batches. Transfer onto another plate.

2. In the same casserole pan, saute your onions and carrots for about 5 mins.

3. Pour the wine into the pan where the veg were sweating and bring to the boil. Deglaze (make sure all the brown bits stuck to the pan come off). Stir in garlic, tomato paste, zest, bay leaves, cumin, clove, star anise. Add about 500 ml of water or beef stock.

4. Return the oxtail pieces into the pan with all the juices that have accumulated in the plate by then. Cover the pan with a close-fitting lid and braise in the oven for about 2.5-3 hours.

5. Take out of the oven. Pour all the liquid into a separate jug, and when cooled, put the liquid and the meat into fridge overnight.

6. The following day, pre-heat the oven to 150C. Take off the fat layer from the top of the jellied gravy (there’ll be good cm or so), plus any visible fat from the meat pieces (you can use this fat later to fry potatoes or other such!).

7. Pour the jellied liquid into the pan where you cooked the tail originally. Bring to the boil and continue to boil until it’s reduced by about half (about 10 mins). Add the juice from the squeezed orange, put the oxtail pieces back in.

8. Braise in the oven for another hour until completely coming off the bone.

9. Important – serve with buckwheat and slightly crunchy stewed red cabbage.