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Beef Palates, Fricasseed
Put six well-cleaned palates into a stewpan, with just water enough to cover them; add a bunch of parsley, a glass of white wine, a tea-spoonful of salt and sugar, and a little pepper. Simmer three hours, and strain the liquor. Blend two ounces of good butter with a tablespoonful of flour; dissolve it over the fire, and stir in gradually half a pint of cream, with as much of the liquor in which the palates were boiled as will make it of the proper consistency. Lay the palates into the stewpan, in neat, round slices; add a couple of small cucumbers (divide them into strips, and remove the seeds), two or three small onions, previously boiled, a little nutmeg, grated, with cayenne and salt to taste, and stew twenty minutes. When ready to serve, add a table-spoonful of lemon-juice to the sauce. Probable cost of palates, 6d. each. Sufficient for a dish to serve six or seven persons.
A Victorian offal dish in a blond-roux cream sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the raw material takes preparation the original assumes you already know.
- Sourcing and cleaningOx palates are the roof of the mouth, sold only by butchers who break down whole heads; expect to order them. "Well-cleaned" means scalded until the tough outer skin lifts, then scraped off entirely — left on, that layer stays leathery and spoils the dish.
- The three hours is a minimumPalates are almost pure collagen and go from rubber to silk only when fully broken down. Simmer gently until a knife slides through with no resistance, which can run to four hours; slicing them into rounds before they are tender is wasted work.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz and the half pint of cream is about 1¼ cups. A "glass" of wine in books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz (a quarter cup), though the measure was never standardised.
- The roux stays paleTwo ounces butter to one tablespoon flour is a loose, buttery liaison rather than a stiff roux. Cook it only until it stops smelling of raw flour — any colour and the sauce loses the white finish the dish depends on.
- Lemon juice at the end, off the heatThe instruction to add it "when ready to serve" is the hinge. Acid stirred into hot cream can split it, especially over direct heat; take the pan off, stir the juice in, and serve at once.
- Cucumber as a cooked vegetableSeeded strips of cucumber stewed twenty minutes was standard Victorian practice and holds up — they turn translucent and faintly melon-like. Use firm ridge or small pickling cucumbers; watery salad varieties collapse.
- The onions are pre-cooked"Previously boiled" small onions means whole button or pearl onions simmered until just tender before they join the sauce. Twenty minutes in the finished sauce will not cook them from raw.
- Cost and yieldSixpence each was a modest price for a head cut, though six of them comes to three shillings, so this was economical rather than free. The stated six or seven servings probably assumes a place in a multi-course dinner; as a main course with rice or potatoes it would stretch to about four.
Ox palates were a fixture of English cookery from the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth, turning up fricasseed, ragoo'd, forced and fried in Hannah Glasse and her successors, and cookery writers valued them less for flavour — which is mild — than for a gelatinous texture no muscle cut imitates. They were a byproduct of butchery: when whole heads came to market, the palates, cheeks and tongues were sold separately and cheaply, and sixpence apiece places them among the economical dishes a middle-class kitchen could dress up with cream and wine for the table. The white fricassee treatment here — pale roux, cream, cucumber, a squeeze of lemon at the last moment — belongs to the Anglo-French repertoire that shaped genteel British cooking of the period. Palates dropped out of British use over the twentieth century as head butchery moved out of retail shops; they are still eaten elsewhere, notably in Mexico, where the palate is among the head cuts used for tacos.