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Tête à La Mode
611. Take an ox-cheek nicely washed, season it well with pepper, salt, mace, and cloves, and some chopped onion rubbed well over it; put it in a stewpan, with as much water as will cover it; stew it two hours, and when cold skim the fat off. Have ready a cow -heel, well cleaned and boiled tender; cut the head and foot in square bits the size of sugar-lumps, place them in layers in an earthen pan; season between each layer with pepper, salt, and mace; fill the pan with gravy, cover it with a plate, and bake it two hours in a slow oven. It slow oven. is to be eaten cold.
This is a jellied cold meat in the brawn family: cheek for flavour and cow heel for the gelatine that sets it. The whole point is that the cooking liquor turns to a firm jelly when chilled, so the heel is not optional.
- Slow ovenRead the second stage as 300F (150C), covered. The plate on top of the earthen pan is there to hold steam in; foil and a lid do the same job.
- Ox cheekSold as beef cheek, usually 1-1.5 lb each and often vacuum-packed. Trim the heavy silverskin and any glands before seasoning. Two hours' stewing may not bring it to modern tenderness on its own, though the recipe gives the cut-up meat a further two hours in the oven; if in doubt, extend the first simmer until a skewer slides in with little resistance.
- Cow heelA cow's foot, the classic gelatine source of the Victorian kitchen. Butchers serving Caribbean, West African or Chinese customers still stock it, split, and it needs a good scrub and a blanch before its two to three hours of boiling. Two pig's trotters give a comparable set if heel is unobtainable.
- "The size of sugar-lumps"Lumps nipped from a sugar loaf were irregular and varied in size, so the instruction is only a rough guide; something around a 2 cm dice will do. Uniform pieces matter here because they have to pack into layers without large gaps for the jelly to pool.
- MaceThe outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the seed. Ground mace is fine; if you use blade mace, bruise it and keep it in the stewing liquor rather than layering it dry between the meat.
- The gravy must be the cooking liquorFill the pan with the strained, degreased stock from the cheek and heel, not with water or a made gravy. That liquor is what sets. If a spoonful chilled on a saucer stays syrupy, reduce it further before pouring.
- Setting and turning outOnce baked, weight the surface with a plate and a tin and chill at least overnight. Loaf tins lined with cling film turn out more neatly than an earthen pan; slice thin with a wet knife.
- YieldOne cheek and one heel fill a 2 lb loaf tin and serve eight to ten as a cold cut, with mustard, pickles or a sharp salad. Keep it refrigerated and eat within three days.
Tete a la mode belongs to the long English tradition of potted and jellied heads: brawn, collared head, souse, all of them ways of turning the cheapest parts of a large animal into something sliceable and keepable. Ox cheek was among the least expensive cuts in the Victorian butcher's shop and appears constantly in nineteenth-century household books, usually stewed long and served either hot in its own gravy or, as here, set cold in jelly. The French-sounding title is typical of mid-century English cookery writing, which liked to dress a frugal dish in a fashionable name; "a la mode" attached itself to beef, to calf's head and to cheek more or less indiscriminately. The technique is pre-refrigeration in spirit: cooked meat sealed in its own set stock keeps far longer in a cold larder than meat left loose, and the same logic produced the pork pie's jelly and the potted meats of the same books.