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Beef Palates, to Dress
INGRE-.
DIENTS.-4 palates, sufficient gravy to cover them, cayenne to taste, 1 tablespoonful of mushroom ketchup, 1 tablespoonful of pickled onion liquor, thickening of butter and flour.
Wash the palates, and put them into a stewpan, with sufficient water to cover them, and let them boil until perfectly tender, or until the upper skin may be easily peeled off. Have ready sufficient BEEF, PICKLED. gravy to cover them; add a good seasoning of cayenne, and thicken with a little butter kneaded with flour; let it boil up, and skim. Cut the palates into square pieces, put them in the gravy, and let them simmer gently for 1/2 hour; add ketchup and onionliquor, give one boil, and serve. TIME. From 3 to 5 hours to boil the palates.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note.-Palates may be dressed in various ways, with good onion sauce, tomato sauce, &c. &c., and may also be served in a vol-au-vent; but the above will be found a more simple method of dressing them.
Beef Pickle. (This may also be used for any kind of Meat, Tongues, or Hams.)-INGREDIENTS.-6 lbs. of salt, 2 lbs. of fine sugar, 3 oz. of powdered saltpetre, 3 gallons of spring water. Boil all the ingredients gently together, so long as any scum or impurity arises, which carefully remove; when quite cold, pour it over the meat, every part of which must be covered with the brine. This may be used for pickling any kind of meat, and may be kept for some time, if boiled up occasionally with an addition of the ingredients.
TIME.-A ham should be kept in pickle for a fortnight; a piece of beef weighing 14 lbs., 12 or 15 days; a tongue, 10 days or a fortnight.
Note. For salting and pickling meat, it is a good plan to rub in only half the quantity of salt directed, and to let it remain for a day or two to disgorge and effectually to get rid of the blood and slime; then rub in the remainder of the salt and other ingredients, and proceed as above. This rule may be applied to all recipes for salting and pickling meat.
Two separate items sit on this page: a stew of ox palates, which is straightforward if you can get the ingredient, and a general curing brine that no longer meets modern practice. The caution above applies to the Beef Pickle, not to the palates.
- Why the pickle failsThree ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to three gallons of water gives no reliable indication of how much nitrate ends up in the meat; uptake depends on the cut, its shape, its fat content and how long it sits. Modern curing uses weighed nitrite cure at a fixed percentage of meat weight for exactly this reason.
- No temperature in the pickleA ham is to sit in brine for a fortnight with no storage temperature given. Victorian larders ran cold; a modern kitchen does not. Brining meat for two weeks anywhere above refrigeration temperature is a botulism and spoilage risk, and the recipe's instruction to boil the used brine up and re-use it compounds it. Use a current curing recipe with weights and a stated fridge temperature.
- Palates: sourcingOx palate is the roof of the mouth, sold by whole-animal butchers and halal butchers, usually to order and often frozen. Four palates makes a modest dish; how much it yields depends on their size.
- The hinge: peel while hotThe upper skin lifts away cleanly only while the palate is still hot from its long boil. Let it cool and the skin sets tight and has to be scraped off. Work in batches, keeping the rest in the hot liquor.
- The long boil is realThree to five hours is not exaggeration; palate is dense connective tissue and needs collagen breakdown to become gelatinous rather than rubbery. A pressure cooker will do it in roughly 45 minutes to an hour, though you lose the ability to test and peel progressively.
- "Sufficient gravy"In Beeton, gravy means a strong brown meat stock, often thickened and seasoned, not pan drippings. About 1 pint (2 cups) of good beef stock will cover four cut-up palates.
- Thickening of butter and flourThis is beurre manie: equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste, whisked into the simmering gravy in small pieces. Around 1 oz of each per pint of liquid gives a light coating consistency.
- Mushroom ketchup and onion liquorMushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain; Worcestershire sauce is not the same thing but is the nearest supermarket stand-in, used more sparingly. Pickled onion liquor is simply the vinegar from the jar, and it is there for acidity — a tablespoon of the brine from any decent pickled onion works.
- Final timingThe half hour of gentle simmering after cutting is for flavour, not tenderising; the palates should already be tender before they go into the gravy. Add the ketchup and onion liquor at the end as directed — boiling them long will flatten both.
Ox palate was standard Georgian and early Victorian kitchen material, valued for the same reason as pig's trotters and calf's foot: long cooking turns its collagen to gelatine, giving a rich, faintly sticky texture that thickens a sauce without flour. Eighteenth-century cooks such as Hannah Glasse and Elizabeth Raffald fried, fricasseed and ragouted palates, and palate is said to have suited the vol-au-vent that Beeton mentions in her note — a light puff-pastry case wanting a soft, gelatinous filling, though that form belongs to the nineteenth century rather than the eighteenth. By the time this book was assembled in 1861 the dish was already being presented as the simple, economical option rather than the fashionable one, and offal of this kind largely disappeared from British domestic cooking over the following century as butchery moved away from whole-carcase selling. The Beef Pickle printed alongside it belongs to the older rhythm of the household year, when a family bought or killed meat in quantity and preserved it in a standing brine tub that, as the recipe puts it, may be kept for some time if boiled up occasionally.