Oxtail Soup

We were sitting at the dinner table yesterday, and C. Peevie mentioned that he had the opportunity to taste the famous oxtail soup created by the many-talented dad of his classmate, G-Man.

"It was so delicious, Dad," C. Peevie said. "J. Cub was crazy for it, too." We were interested to hear more about it, because it sounds kind of exotic, and none of the rest of us had ever tried it. Later on, after the conversation had turned to a new topic, M. Peevie brought up the soup again.

"Maybe we could try to make our own coxtail soup!" she suggested, offering an amusing variation on the name, which we all repeated with much hilarity. And then C. Peevie suggested that there might be such a thing in real life as coxtail soup--or perhaps it would be spelled "cockstail" soup.

"Because," he started to point out, "Cock is another word for..."

It was like he was talking in slow motion. I was standing across the room, and my head swung around and I made eye contact with Mr. Peevie. Later he told me they were big like saucers. Really, really big saucers. I think some suspenseful music started playing, like we were in a movie. Mr. Peevie and I both stopped breathing.

"...chicken!" he finished. "A cock is a male chicken. So the soup would be made from, well, from chicken tails."

Phew. Mr. P and I started breathing again, and we all laughed at the idea of chicken-butt soup. Later I told Mr. Peevie that I thought it was totally possible that C. Peevie had done that little verbal game of chicken (pun intended) on purpose--that he knew what we'd be thinking, and that he may have even included a dramatic pause just to increase our silent panic. He can be brilliantly evil that way, like Darth Vader or Hannibal Lecter or Ann Coulter.

And in case you're interested, here's a recipe for Oxtail Soup from one of my favorite online recipe sources, epicurious.com.