The short answer is that your father’s account is pretty much correct.

In his excellent book The Cooking Gene, culinary historian Michael Twitter traces the origins and development of American Black cuisine. African slaves, largely cut off from the crops they were used to and reduced to conditions of near-starvation, were forced to develop a culinary tradition that made efficient use of what little was available to them: greens and vegetables that could be grown in the few free hours left to them, hunted and foraged foods, and the off-cuts of food meant for the master’s table. Oxtail falls in this last category: a tough, sinewy cut of meat that requires slow, even cooking to be palatable. While steaks and chops could be cooked quickly over a hot fire, oxtail (along with other “lesser” cuts such as feet, head and various entrails) needed long hours of work to be something people wanted to eat. Put simply, this was a method of cooking that worked for people who had very little money and little spare time to tend a hot stove, but could leave a pot on the simmer all day.

In this respect (and this is further explored in Twitty’s second book, Kosher Soul), it resembles many cuisines of poverty worldwide. Oxtail is also a popular item in West Indian cooking, for much the same reason as in the American Soul tradition. My own people, the ashkenazim, adopted oxtail dishes for the same reason, and I have happy memories of stealing a few vertebrae from the pot while my grandfather cooked.

Your question goes to what I find most wonderful about culinary history. People with very little used ingenuity to not only survive, but create art under conditions of unimaginable cruelty. Today, in a world where their descendants can afford to eat steaks, something about those old recipes still attracts us in a way fine cuts don’t.

I hope you enjoyed your lunch.

Sources: The Cooking Gene and Kosher Soul by Michael Twitty.