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Financière Sauce (Soak the palates in water)
4 Soak the palates in water with a good handful of salt for several hours, cleaning them well; then parboil them in salt and water until the hard skin can be easily scraped off. When thoroughly clean put them on to cook in the stock with the onion, carrot, celery, parsley, cloves, mace, garlic, peppercorns, and some salt; let them boil gently till quite tender, about four hours. Then press them between two dishes till cold; when cold cut them into pieces two inches wide and three inches long; spread each of these with a thin layer of quenelle meat in which some fine herbs have been mixed; each scollop must be rolled up tightly in a piece of buttered writing paper and placed in a sauté-pan; simmer these for about twenty minutes in some of the stock in which the palates were cooked. Take them out of the papers, trim the ends off neatly, roll them in some half-glaze made by reducing some of the stock, dish them up in a conical form with Financière ragoût in the centre, and Financière sauce poured over the entrée,
This is the assembly instruction for an entrée of ox palates, written for a kitchen brigade that already had stock, quenelle forcemeat and Financière garnish standing by. The recipe assumes all three; the note number "4" points to an ingredient list printed elsewhere in the book.
- The hinge: scrape while hotThe horny outer skin of an ox palate lifts away only while the palate is still hot from parboiling. Let it cool and the skin sets fast again, and you will be back to boiling it a second time.
- Sourcing palatesOx palates are the roof of a beef mouth, sold by whole-animal butchers and in some halal and Caribbean shops, usually to order. There is no supermarket equivalent; blanched, pressed veal breast or beef cheek is the nearest textural stand-in if you are chasing the effect rather than the authentic cut.
- Writing paperPeriod recipes call for plain rag-based writing paper, buttered, as a wrapping. Use buttered parchment; modern writing and printer paper carries coatings and optical brighteners not meant for food contact.
- Quenelle meatQuenelle forcemeat of this period is pounded veal or chicken with panada, butter and egg, sieved smooth. A food processor does in two minutes what a mortar did in twenty, but keep everything cold or the emulsion breaks and the layer weeps out of the roll.
- Financière ragoûtThe classic garnish is cockscombs and cock's kidneys, quenelles, button mushrooms, truffle and stoned olives bound in Madeira-scented sauce. Combs and kidneys are effectively unobtainable now; mushrooms, truffle, olives and small quenelles carry the dish.
- Half-glazeHere it means the palate cooking stock reduced until it coats a spoon and glosses the rolls, not Escoffier's demi-glace of espagnole plus stock. Reduce hard, uncovered, and season only at the end.
- Four hours is not paddingPalate is dense collagen. It genuinely needs three to four hours at a bare tremble to turn gelatinous; brought to a rolling boil it stays rubbery and the stock clouds.
- PressingPress between two dishes with a weight until cold so the pieces are flat enough to cut cleanly and spread evenly. Overnight in the refrigerator under a couple of tins is easiest.
- YieldA large palate yields only a handful of scollops at the stated two by three inches, enough for a small number of portions as an entrée in the old sense of a course between fish and roast.
Financière is one of the grand nineteenth-century garnitures, its name traditionally explained by the financier's supposed appetite for expensive things: truffles, cockscombs, cock's kidneys and Madeira, all luxuries that announced the cost of the plate. Ox palates belong to the same world from the opposite direction: a cheap offal cut that demanded soaking, scraping, long simmering and pressing before it could be dressed up as an entrée. Books of "high class cookery" at the end of the century were often aimed at cooks in private service and at the schools training them, and this recipe is a fair sample of what that meant: a cheap cut redeemed entirely by labour and by the cost of what surrounds it. Both halves of the dish fell away in the twentieth century, the palates because few cooks would spend a day on them and the ragoût because cockscombs disappeared from the trade.