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Sweetbreads and Palates, Pie Of
Take an equal number of sweetbreads and palates, and prepare them both in the usual way. Let them stew till tender in good brown gravy, and lay them in a dish. Let the sauce cool a little, stir into it the well-pounded yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, and pour it upon the meat. Cover the dish with good pastry, and bake in a well-heated oven. When the pastry is done enough the pie will be ready for serving.
A Victorian raised-flavour meat pie built on two organ meats that now need ordering ahead. The recipe assumes you already know how to prepare both, so most of the work sits in the phrase "in the usual way."
- PalatesOx palate is the roof of a bullock's mouth, sold by a few traditional butchers and halal shops on request. It needs long, slow simmering — several hours — after which the rough outer skin scrapes away and the tender layer beneath is cut into pieces. Undercooked palate stays gristly.
- SweetbreadsVeal or lamb sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas). "The usual way" means soaking in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, blanching briefly, cooling, then peeling off the membrane and pressing under a weight before slicing.
- "An equal number"The original counts pieces, not weight. Two veal sweetbreads and two prepared palates make a pie dish for about four to six, though sweetbread sizes vary a good deal.
- Good brown gravyHere this means a made brown sauce rather than pan drippings: browned mirepoix, flour, and beef or veal stock reduced until it coats a spoon. Use enough to stew the meat and moisten the pie. It should be well seasoned before it goes near the meat, as the pastry lid seals in whatever flavour it has.
- The egg-yolk sauceLet the sauce cool a little, as directed, before stirring in the pounded hard-boiled yolks; they enrich and lightly thicken it, and a sauce off the boil lets them be worked in smoothly instead of clumping.
- Oven"Well-heated" suggests a hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 400-425F. The filling is already cooked, so the bake is only about the crust: roughly 25-35 minutes, until deep gold and set underneath.
- AssemblyHave the meat and sauce no more than warm when the lid goes on, and use a pie funnel or vent the top. A boiling-hot filling steams the underside of the pastry and lifts the lid away from the dish.
Sweetbreads and ox palate were staples of nineteenth-century English cookery precisely because they were offal that could be dressed as elegantly as a joint — though sweetbreads in particular were not a cheap cut. Palate appears in Cassell's, Soyer and Francatelli, and it turns up in ragoûts, fricassees and pies throughout the period. The pounded hard-boiled yolk stirred into the sauce is an older thickening trick, generally associated with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English receipts and still lingering here alongside the newer flour-based brown sauces. Palate fell out of British cooking in the twentieth century as offal consumption narrowed to liver, kidney and heart; sweetbreads survived in restaurant cooking, which is why a modern reader can usually find one half of this pie and rarely the other.