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Ox Palates, Curried
Soak and boil three ox palates as before directed. Press them between dishes, and when cold cut them into pieces an inch and a half square. Put three sliced onions and one apple into a stewpan with two ounces of butter. Cover them closely and let them steam until they are tender, but they must not brown. Mix a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder very smoothly with half a pint of good gravy. Pour this into the saucepan, and add a tea-spoonful of vinegar, a dessert-spoonful of brandy, a small lump of sugar, a little salt and pepper if required, and the sliced palates. Simmer gently for half an hour, then take out the palates, and strain the gravy. Mix a dessert-spoonful of ground rice very smoothly with a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup. Thicken the gravy with this, put in the palates again, and boil gently half an hour longer. Serve the palates on a hot dish, with a border of rice boiled as for curry round it. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian offal curry that depends entirely on the preliminary boiling the recipe assumes you have already read. Everything else is straightforward stewing.
- "As before directed"Ox palate needs long soaking in cold water, then several hours of gentle simmering until the rough outer skin can be peeled away, leaving the pale gelatinous layer beneath. Skip that and the pieces are inedible; the half-hour simmers in this recipe are for flavour, not tenderising.
- SourcingBeef palate is not a supermarket cut. A halal or Caribbean butcher, or one who breaks whole heads, is the realistic source; ask for it fresh and use it the same day.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is usually reckoned at two teaspoons. Spoon sizes were not standardised in this period, so a tablespoonful may run somewhat larger than the modern 15 ml; either way the difference does not matter in a gravy.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. "Good gravy" means proper brown beef stock reduced until it has body, not thickened pan gravy.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice, sold as ground rice or rice flour, used here as the thickener. Slaked into the mushroom ketchup first so it does not lump; it gives a softer, slightly cloudy body than a flour roux.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still made commercially in Britain and quite unlike tomato ketchup. Worcestershire sauce is the nearest common substitute, though saltier and sharper, so hold back on the added salt.
- The onions must not colourSteaming the onions and apple under a tight lid in butter until soft but pale is the point of that step. Browning them pushes the sauce toward a stew and away from the mild curry style the book is after.
- Curry powderVictorian curry powders were generally milder and leant more on turmeric and coriander than many modern blends, though recipes and commercial mixtures varied. Two teaspoons of a hot contemporary powder will dominate; taste and adjust, and let it cook in the gravy rather than adding it at the end.
- Total simmeringAn hour of gentle simmering in two stages. Keep it at a bare tremble; palate is gelatinous and will shed into the sauce at a rolling boil.
Ox palates were a standard item in English kitchens from the seventeenth century well into the nineteenth, appearing fricasseed, ragooed, forced and, as here, curried. They belong to the same thrift that used cheek, tongue, tripe and heel: cheap, gelatinous cuts from the head that repay long cooking with body and richness. Their disappearance from British cooking is often attributed, though not conclusively, to the twentieth-century move away from whole-carcass butchery, with changing taste perhaps also playing a part. The curry treatment is equally characteristic of Cassell's period: curry powder had been sold ready-blended in Britain since the late eighteenth century, and by the 1870s a mild, apple-sweetened, ketchup-darkened curry with a border of boiled rice was thoroughly domesticated English cooking, a long way from any Indian original.