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Beef Palates, Stewed
Cleanse, soak, and boil the palates, as before directed. Skin and cut four into slices of from one to two inches broad, and let them stew in some rich gravy, well seasoned with salt, cayenne, and mace, a table-spoonful of grated ham or tongue, and a couple of cloves. When they have stewed for about half an hour, add two ounces of butter, a little flour, a glass of sherry, and a table-spoonful of lemon-juice. Serve on a dish in a circle, with croutons arranged alternately with the palates. Probable cost, 6d. each. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian entrée built on ox palate, one of the cheap offal cuts that has almost entirely left English butchery. Everything depends on the preliminary boiling that Cassell's assumes you have already read about.
- "As before directed"The omitted first stage is the long one: palates are generally soaked in several changes of cold water for some hours, blanched, then simmered very gently for several hours until a skewer goes through easily and the thick grey outer skin rubs off. The skin is easiest to remove while they are still hot.
- SourcingOx palate is a special order. Halal and Latin American butchers are the likeliest source; ask for beef palate or paladar. Four palates is a substantial amount of meat once trimmed.
- Rich gravyHere this implies a well-reduced brown stock or a light espagnole rather than thin pan juices. Roughly a pint for four sliced palates should keep them barely covered during the half-hour stew.
- A glass of sherryA wineglass in Victorian usage is roughly 2 fl oz, so a scant quarter cup. Dry or medium sherry; sweet cream sherry will fight the mace and cayenne.
- Mace and clovesMace here means blade mace if you have it, or a small pinch of ground. Two cloves is deliberately restrained, and worth respecting: cloves dominate quickly in a gravy this concentrated.
- Grated ham or tongueA seasoning, not a filling. Dry-cured ham grated on the fine side of a box grater dissolves into the sauce and supplies the salt, so hold back on added salt until the end.
- Thickening"Two ounces of butter, a little flour" is most easily handled as a beurre manié worked together off the heat and whisked in in small pieces. The recipe adds it along with the sherry and lemon juice; let the sauce barely bubble afterwards, or it will taste of raw flour.
- CroûtonsNot soup croutons but neat shaped pieces of fried bread, arranged alternately with the slices as the recipe directs. Fry them at the last minute; they soften within minutes of touching the sauce.
- YieldThe book's four or five persons assumes this is one dish among several courses. As a main course with potatoes it will serve three.
Ox palate was standard nineteenth-century kitchen material, valued for a texture between tongue and tendon that turns silky and slightly gelatinous after long boiling and takes up sauce well. It appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, often in ragoûts and made dishes alongside cockscombs, sweetbreads and calf's ears, and it was cheap enough that Cassell's can quote sixpence apiece while still presenting the result as a dressed entrée fit for a circle of fried croûtons. Its disappearance from British cooking probably owes more to butchery than to taste: as slaughtering moved out of the neighbourhood and heads stopped being broken down locally, the small odd cuts were far less likely to reach the shop counter. Palate survives in kitchens that never lost the habit.