Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ox Cheek, Boiled
Ox Cheek, Boiled
Many excellent and economical dishes may be made from an ox cheek, which is highly gelatinous and nourishing, and often proves very useful in large families. Take a moderate-sized ox cheek, or half a large one. Wash carefully, and soak it in cold water for five or six hours. Drain it, rub it well with a table-spoonful of salt and a tea-spoonful of pepper, and put it into a large pan with four quarts of cold water, two or three sticks of celery, and two onions. When the contents boil, skim carefully, draw the pan to the side of the fire, and simmer very gently until the meat is quite tender, which will be in three hours from the time of boiling. Place the head on a dish with a little of the gravy, and send turnips, carrots, and potatoes to table with it. The liquor will make excellent broth. Probable cost, 6d. per pound. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A straightforward long simmer that depends on collagen rather than fat, so the only real variable is how gently and how long you keep it going.
- What to buyOx cheek is beef cheek, usually sold trimmed and boneless at roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb each, though many butchers will need to order it. The Victorian "cheek" often came with bone and more surrounding head meat attached, so two boneless cheeks are closer to the original's bulk than one.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe hinge: once skimmed, keep it below a boil -- the recipe brings the pot up, skims, then "draws the pan to the side of the fire," meaning a bare tremble with the surface barely moving. Cheek is hard-working muscle laced with connective tissue; a rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and leaves them stringy even after the collagen has softened.
- TimingThree hours is the minimum for boneless cheek and often optimistic. Test with a skewer: it should slide in with no resistance and the meat should yield to a spoon. Four hours at a whisper is common, though once it is fully tender further cooking will start to shred it.
- The soakFive or six hours in cold water draws out blood and, on bone-in cuts, loose splinters. With modern trimmed cheek an hour is ample, and you can skip it entirely if you skim the pot attentively in the first ten minutes.
- QuantitiesFour quarts here is imperial measure, about 4.5 litres or some 20 US cups, which is more than enough to cover two cheeks in a narrow pot. A tablespoon of salt across that volume is modest for the finished broth, so expect to season again at the end.
- The vegetablesThe celery and onions in the pot are aromatics and will be spent. The recipe does not say how the turnips, carrots and potatoes "sent to table" were cooked; boiling or steaming them plainly alongside while the meat finishes works well.
- The brothStrain and chill the cooking liquor overnight. Depending on how much it has reduced it may set to a jelly from the cheek's gelatine, and the fat lifts off the top in a sheet. Reduce it for sauce or use it as a stock base.
- YieldSix to eight servings is right if the vegetables and broth are counted as part of the meal. As a main course of meat alone, two cheeks feed four generously.
Ox cheek belonged to the category of meat that Victorian cookery writers called economical, meaning cheap enough to be a serious proposition for a large household but too slow and too odd-looking for a fashionable table. Cassell's price of sixpence a pound puts it well below a joint of sirloin, and the note that it is "highly gelatinous and nourishing" reflects a widely held but much disputed view that gelatine was itself a nutritive substance — a question argued over throughout the century — which nonetheless fed the whole nineteenth-century enthusiasm for stocks, jellies and invalid broths. The cut has since travelled in the opposite direction: as head meat vanished from ordinary butchers' counters through the twentieth century it became scarce, and it returned in recent decades as a restaurant braise, priced accordingly. The method here, a long submerged simmer with celery and onion and nothing else, is the plainest possible treatment and still the one that shows what the cut does best.