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Beef Palates, Fried
Blanch three ox palates for ten minutes; scrape them carefully, and boil slowly for three hours. When tender, take off the skin, and slice them for frying. Dissolve a little butter, and shred up some onion and parsley. Dip each slice of palate into the butter; then into the parsley and onion, which should be seasoned with salt and cayenne. Fry from five to eight minutes, a nice brown colour, and serve with lemon-juice over the slices, and fried parsley as garnish. Probable cost, 6d. each. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian offal dish that depends entirely on two things: long, patient simmering, and peeling the skin while the palate is still hot. Everything after that is quick.
- The hinge: skin them warmThe tough outer membrane lifts away cleanly only while the palate is hot from the pot. Let it cool and the skin welds back down, and you will be picking at it with a knife for twenty minutes.
- SourcingOx (beef) palate is the roof of the animal's mouth. It is not a supermarket cut anywhere in the English-speaking world now; order it from a halal or Latin American butcher, or one who breaks whole heads. Three palates is perhaps a pound and a half to two pounds, though the weight varies with the animal.
- Blanch, then scrapeThe ten-minute blanch is not cooking, it is loosening surface debris and slime. Scrape firmly with the back of a knife under running water and discard that water before starting the three-hour simmer in fresh liquid.
- Three hours is not paddingPalate is largely collagen and connective tissue. Under three hours at a bare simmer it stays rubbery; the texture you want is yielding and slightly gelatinous, like well-cooked tripe. A pressure cooker should get there in roughly 45 minutes to an hour at high pressure. Salted water or a light stock with a bay leaf improves it, as the original gives no seasoning at this stage.
- "Dissolve a little butter"This means melted, not browned or clarified. The recipe specifies only "a little": enough to coat the slices so the onion and parsley adhere. Chop the onion very fine, near a paste, or it will slide off and scorch in the pan.
- FryingSlice about a quarter-inch thick. Five to eight minutes suits a moderately hot pan in shallow fat, turning once; the aim is colour, since the meat is already fully cooked. Watch the onion, which burns well before the palate browns.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing and turn brilliant green, then drained on paper. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- Yield and costThe stated 6d. each is a 19th-century price for a cheap variety meat and means nothing today. Four to five servings is optimistic for a main course; treat it as a starter for four, with the lemon juice added only at the table.
Cassell's places this among the everyday economies of a large Victorian household, where an ox head yielded cheek, tongue and palate, and nothing was thrown out. Palate had a long run in English cookery well before this book: it appears in 18th-century collections in ragouts and made dishes, valued for its gelatinous body rather than any strong flavour, and it turns up as a filler in mock-turtle soup and in raised pies alongside sweetbreads and cockscombs. The frying treatment here, breadless but coated in butter and chopped herbs and finished with lemon and a fried garnish, is one of several Victorian ways of making a long-boiled cheap cut look like a plated entree. British taste for it collapsed in the 20th century along with most head meat, though palate is said to survive in some Mexican and, reportedly, Chinese and West African cooking, which is why the butchers who stock it today are usually not English ones.