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Ox Palates, Stewed
Prepare and boil three palates as before directed. Cut them into pieces, and place them in a stewpan with three-quarters of a pint of brown gravy, and a wine-glassful of sherry or port. Let them simmer gently for half an hour, then thicken the gravy with a little rice-flour, and serve very hot. Ox tails may be stewed and dished with the ox palates. The slices of palate are sometimes larded and lightly browned before being stewed. Time to boil the palates, four hours. Sufficient for three persons.
An offal dish that depends almost entirely on the preliminary boiling the recipe defers to an earlier entry. Everything after that is a straightforward braise finished with wine and a starch liaison.
- The hinge: skinning while hotThe tough outer skin is scraped or peeled away while the palates are still hot, since it sets hard once cold. This is part of what "as before directed" covers; the recipe itself does not say at what stage, and instructions of the period differ over whether the skin comes off after a preliminary scald or after the long simmer.
- The four-hour boil is realOx palate is dense connective tissue and does not shortcut. Simmer, never boil hard, until a skewer meets no resistance; a pressure cooker will do it in about an hour if you prefer, but the texture wants the gentler route.
- SourcingOx palate is not a supermarket item. A halal or Caribbean butcher, or a whole-animal butcher given notice, is the realistic source; it is sometimes sold as beef palate. Three palates is a substantial amount of meat once trimmed.
- Three-quarters of a pintImperial measure, so 15 fl oz, near enough to two US cups. A wine-glassful in Victorian cookery books is about 2 fl oz, not a modern 6 oz pour.
- Brown gravyMost likely the book's own made brown gravy rather than drippings from a joint: a stock thickened and coloured with browned flour. A well-reduced dark beef stock, lightly thickened, gives the same result.
- Rice-flour thickeningRice flour was a common thickener in Victorian kitchens. Slake it in cold liquid first and give it two or three minutes at a simmer; cornflour or arrowroot behave similarly, arrowroot giving the glossiest finish.
- LardingThe optional larding threads strips of back fat through the slices with a larding needle, which offsets the leanness of the palate. Wrapping or barding is easier if you have no needle.
- YieldThree servings as written, as a course in a larger meal rather than a modern main plate. Adding oxtail, which the recipe offers as an option, would make it go further.
Ox palate belonged to the long English tradition of using every part of the beast, and it appears in cookery books from the seventeenth century onward in ragoos, pies and fricassees, prized for a gelatinous texture that sat somewhere between tripe and sweetbread. Cassell's dictionary, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households with servants and a butcher who supplied whole heads, treats it as unremarkable and gives it several entries. Its disappearance from British kitchens has less to do with taste than with the industrialisation of slaughter: heads stopped being broken down for retail sale, and the UK specified bovine offal controls from 1989 onward restricted skull, brain and eyes and imposed conditions on recovered head meat. Where the dish survives, it is largely outside northern Europe, in Mexican tacos de cabeza and in Chinese and Middle Eastern braises.