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Ox Cheek, Stewed
Prepare the ox cheek as in the last recipe. Let it simmer for two hours, then take it up, drain it, and put the liquid aside to cool. Remove the thick layer of fat which will collect on the top, and put the soup back into the pan with the ox cheek. Let it boil once more, then add a large onion with six cloves stuck in it, a basinful of mixed vegetables cut into small pieces, and consisting of three turnips, three carrots, two leeks, three sticks of celery, two or three sprigs of parsley, a small sprig of thyme, two bay-leaves, a blade of mace, half a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and a little more salt, if required. Simmer two hours longer. Take up the meat, cut it into neat slices. Strain the gravy. Thicken one pint and a half of it with a little butter rolled in flour, and serve the slices in a dish with the sauce poured over them. A glassful of red wine may be stirred into this sauce, or it may be drawn from the fire for a minute or two, and then mixed with the well-beaten yolks of two eggs; or a little lemon-juice may be squeezed over the meat, and the sauce poured over afterwards. Probable cost of ox cheek, 6d. per pound. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A long two-stage braise of beef cheek, with the cooking liquor defatted between stages. The recipe assumes you have already cleaned and blanched the cheek according to the preceding entry in the book.
- What the missing first step wasThe preceding entry is not reproduced here, but Victorian recipes for ox cheek commonly begin with soaking the cheek in cold salted water for several hours, then washing it well and putting it into a pan with cold water to cover, bringing it slowly to a boil and skimming carefully. Something of that sort is the likely intention before the two-hour simmer called for here.
- Ox cheek todayThis is beef cheek, sold by butchers as cheek or head meat and sometimes found in supermarkets. One whole cheek weighs roughly 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed; for six servings you want two, or about 3 lb. Ask for the silverskin to be removed.
- Simmer means simmerFour hours in total is not excessive for cheek, which is dense with connective tissue, but the surface should barely tremble. A rolling boil at any stage will shred the meat and cloud the liquor, which matters here because the finished sauce is a strained gravy.
- Chilling the liquorThe instruction to cool the liquid and lift off the set fat is the whole point of the two-stage method. Overnight in the refrigerator gives a clean lift; if you are working in one day, chill hard and skim with a ladle, then blot the surface with paper.
- A basinful, a blade, a glassfulThe vegetables are itemised, so the basin is just the bowl they sit in. A blade of mace is one piece of the lacy aril around a nutmeg, about a quarter teaspoon ground if you cannot find whole. A wine glass of the period is roughly 2 to 2.5 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour.
- Thickening the pint and a halfButter rolled in flour is beurre manie: work equal weights of soft butter and flour to a paste, whisk it into the simmering gravy in small pieces, and give it two or three minutes to lose the raw flour taste. About 1 oz each will lightly nap 1.5 imperial pints (30 fl oz, about 3 3/4 US cups).
- The egg yolk finishIf you take the third option, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce before returning them to the pan, and keep the sauce off the heat and below about 180F. Boiling after the yolks go in will curdle the sauce, and it is difficult to recover.
- Yield and servingSix portions, as stated. Slice the cheek across the grain; it will be soft enough that a thick slice holds together better than a thin one. Mashed or boiled potatoes take the sauce well, and the strained vegetables are worth keeping back and returning to the dish rather than discarding.
Ox cheek belongs to the economical end of Victorian meat cookery, and the price given here says so plainly: sixpence a pound at a time when a joint of sirloin cost considerably more. Cassell's, like Soyer and Mrs Beeton before it, took seriously the problem of feeding a household well on the cheaper cuts, and the head meat of an ox "" cheek, palate, tongue "" was gelatinous, cheap and abundant in cities where cattle were slaughtered close to where they were eaten. The technique on show is the classic answer to such a cut: a very long, very gentle simmer to convert collagen to gelatin, a deliberate pause to lift the fat, and then a second cooking with the aromatics so their flavour is not boiled away over four hours. The three optional finishes "" red wine, an egg yolk liaison, lemon juice "" are a small lesson in the same book's habit of showing a cook how to lift a humble dish toward the table of a family with pretensions. Beef cheek is often said to have fallen out of British domestic use for much of the twentieth century and to have returned through restaurant kitchens, where the slow braise had never gone away.