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Ox Cheek, Cold
Cut into neat slices the remains of an ox cheek which has been boiled until quite tender. Arrange these on a dish, and pour over them a sauce prepared as follows. Beat the yolk of an egg for two or three minutes, then mix with it half a tea-spoonful of made mustard, a pinch of pepper and salt, eight table-spoonfuls of oil, and two table-spoonfuls of tarragon vinegar. The oil should be put in first in very small quantities at a time, and the sauce should be well beaten between each addition, or the oil will not mix well. Garnish the dish with parsley, and send bread and butter to table with it. Time, half an hour to beat the sauce. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the cold meat.
This is a dish of leftovers: cold sliced braised beef cheek under a hand-beaten mayonnaise. The sauce is the whole of the work, and the only real difficulty is getting the oil in slowly enough.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropOne yolk carrying eight tablespoons (about 120 ml) of oil is close to the practical limit for hand work. Beat the yolk with the mustard, salt and pepper first, then add the oil a few drops at a time until the emulsion visibly thickens, and only then in a thin stream.
- "Half an hour to beat the sauce"That is hand-beating time. A balloon whisk brings it together in five to eight minutes; an immersion blender in a narrow jug does it in under a minute. The recipe puts the oil in first, so the vinegar goes in at the end, to thin and season the finished emulsion.
- If it splitsStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken sauce into it, again a spoonful at a time. Cold ingredients are the usual cause, so have the yolk and oil at room temperature.
- Made mustard"Made" means prepared, wet mustard rather than dry powder — English mustard is the period-correct choice and half a teaspoon of it is noticeably hot. Dijon works and helps the emulsion.
- The oilVictorian "salad oil" was generally olive. A light olive oil or a neutral oil gives a sauce closer to what was intended; a strong extra-virgin oil can taste bitter in a mayonnaise, especially if machine-blended.
- The cheek itselfOx cheek is beef cheek; it is worth ordering ahead from a butcher. The recipe assumes it boiled until quite tender at a previous meal -- three to four hours at a bare simmer -- before it will slice cleanly when cold.
- Slicing coldChill the cooked cheek under a little weight overnight. It carves into firm, neat slices that way; warm, it shreds.
- Raw yolkThe sauce is never heated. Use the freshest eggs you can, or pasteurised yolks if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the dish refrigerated until it goes to table.
- YieldThe sauce as written makes roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough to coat sliced meat for four. Bread and butter and a little parsley are the whole of the accompaniment; a few capers or chopped gherkin would not be out of period.
Ox cheek was one of the cheapest things a Victorian butcher sold, and Cassell's treats it accordingly — long boiled for a hot dinner, then reappearing cold the next day under a sauce that costs eightpence and does the work of making thrift look like a course. The sauce is plain mayonnaise, and the tarragon vinegar marks it as belonging to the French salad-sauce tradition that had settled comfortably into middle-class English kitchens by then. The instruction to note "probable cost, exclusive of the cold meat" is characteristic of the book: its readers were housekeepers accounting for every dish, and a recipe that used up yesterday's joint for the price of an egg and a little oil was exactly the kind of information they had bought the dictionary for.