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Ox Palates, Grilled
Prepare four ox palates as before directed. Put them into a stewpan with as much water or stock as will cover them, and let them boil until they are quite tender, then drain them, and press them between two dishes until they are cold. Cut them in slices two inches long and half an inch wide, lay these in a pie-dish, and cover them with a marinade made of a quarter of a pint of vinegar, two table-spoonfuls of sweet-oil, half a tea-spoonful of pepper, a spoonful of salt, a bunch of parsley, half a dozen chives, and two or three bay-leaves. When they have soaked in this for an hour or two, drain them, cover them with crumbs of bread, and fry them in hot fat until they become brown. Or, after they are taken out of the marinade, make a paste by mixing a heaped table-spoonful of flour very smoothly with the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, and adding a table-spoonful of salad-oil, a little salt and pepper, and a glassful of sherry. Dip the slices of palate in this batter, and fry them as before. Drain the fat carefully from them, and serve them in a circle on a hot dish. Send piquant or tomato sauce to table with them. Time, four hours to boil the palates; five minutes to fry them. Sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian offal dish that survives mainly in the hands of butchers who still break down a whole head. The method is simple, but the preliminary step the book assumes you have already read is the one that decides whether the dish works at all.
- "As before directed"The omitted preparation is a scald: the palates go into boiling water long enough that the tough outer skin can be scraped or peeled away, then they are washed and trimmed. Skipping it leaves a rubbery grey layer that no amount of stewing softens.
- SourcingOx palate is the hard upper mouth of a steer and is not a supermarket item. Halal and West Indian butchers, and any butcher who buys whole heads, will get it with notice; expect to order it frozen. The recipe reckons four palates for four people.
- Four hours is not an exaggerationPalate is almost entirely collagen and needs long, gentle simmering to turn gelatinous and tender. Test with a knife tip rather than a clock — it should offer no resistance. Undercooked palate is unpleasantly springy. A pressure cooker cuts this to roughly 45–60 minutes.
- Pressing between two dishesThis is what makes the slices hold together for frying. Weight them while still warm, chill until firm, then cut. Cold, pressed palate slices about half an inch wide are far easier to crumb than warm floppy ones.
- Old measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, or a scant 2/3 cup. "Sweet-oil" and "salad-oil" in this period generally both mean olive oil. A "glassful" of sherry is imprecise; a Victorian wineglassful is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz rather than a tumblerful. "A spoonful of salt" is generous for this quantity of marinade; a scant teaspoon is closer to modern taste.
- Why "grilled" when it says fryThe title is loose: nothing here goes near a gridiron. In this period "grilled" was sometimes applied to crumbed, sharply seasoned and browned dishes, in a sense overlapping with devilled, but the usage was not consistent.
- FryingFive minutes is right only for shallow or deep fat that is genuinely hot, around 350–375F. The palate is already cooked through; the frying is purely for colour and crust.
- The two coatingsBreadcrumbs give a drier, sharper result and suit the piquant sauce; the egg-yolk, flour, oil and sherry batter is closer to a fritter and clings better to irregular slices. The batter benefits from resting 20 minutes before use.
Ox palate had a long run in English and French cookery as a cheap source of gelatinous texture — it appears in ragouts, pies and mock-turtle preparations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, valued for the same silky quality that makes tendon prized in Chinese and Vietnamese cooking today. Cassell's, published for middle-class households that were expected to use the whole beast, treats it as an ordinary entrée alongside tripe, sweetbreads and cow-heel. The dish is built on a familiar Victorian treatment for bland gelatinous meat: boil it tender, marinate it hard in vinegar and herbs, crumb it, fry it, and send a sharp sauce to table. That formula survived long after palate itself dropped out of ordinary British butchery, a decline usually attributed to the movement of head meat away from the retail counter, though the reasons are not settled.