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Curried Beef Palates
Prepare two palates as for braising, cutting them up into shapes. Put them into a saucepan with sufficient brown stock to cover, and add one or two onions, cut in slices, a tablespoonful of curry powder, half the quantity of curry paste, two tablespoonfuls of flour mixed in a little stock, and salt to taste; put the pan on the fire, stir frequently, and cook slowly until they are done. Just before serving add two tablespoonfuls of cream to the liquor, mix it in, turn the whole out onto a dish and serve very hot. Fricassee of Beef Palates with Truffles The palates must be boiled till tender in salted water in which has been placed a slice of lemon and a lump of butter. Drain and skin the palates, and cut them into small pieces. Put two ounces of butter and two tablespoonfuls of flour into a saucepan, and stir over the fire for ten or fifteen minutes, but do not let it take color; then pour on gradually the required quantity of chicken broth, add a few mushrooms, small onions and a bunch of parsley, and boil the sauce till well flavored with the herbs. Strain the sauce into another stewpan season with salt and sugar, and boil till reduced. Cut some truffles into small pieces, put them in a fryingpan with some butter, add a little salt and fry over a brisk fire. Move the sauce to the side of the fire, stir in a liaison of beaten yolks of eggs; put the truffles and palates into the sauce, and make them hot again without boiling. Turn the fricassee into a deep dish or a casserole of rice, and serve.
Two dishes in one entry, both built on beef palates — the fibrous roof of the animal's mouth, an offal cut that was standard in professional kitchens of the period and has all but disappeared from retail butchery. Everything depends on the long preliminary cooking and skinning, which the recipe assumes you already know.
- Sourcing the palatesBeef palates are no longer a general butcher's item; a halal or Latin American butcher, or one who handles whole heads, is the likeliest source, usually to order. Two palates yield roughly a pound of trimmed meat, enough for four as a course.
- "Prepare as for braising" means hours, not minutesThe step Oscar leaves out is the one that takes the longest: palates are soaked in cold water, blanched, then simmered until the tough outer horny skin can be scraped or peeled away, and simmered again until tender. Expect three to four hours of total cooking before either recipe properly begins. Undercooked palate is rubber.
- Curry paste alongside curry powderLate Victorian curry paste was a commercial product — ground spices worked into oil with tamarind, garlic and sometimes dried fish or shrimp — sold under brand names beside the powder. A good jarred Madras-style paste stands in; the point of using both is depth from the oily aromatics on top of the dry blend.
- The flour is a thickener, not a rouxIn the curry, two tablespoons of flour mixed in a little stock is stirred straight into the simmering liquid. Add it in a thin stream while stirring or it will lump, and give it a good ten minutes of gentle cooking afterwards to lose the raw taste.
- The white roux must stay paleTen to fifteen minutes of butter and flour without color is a white roux for a velouté. Any browning and the fricassee turns the wrong shade; keep the heat gentle and stir.
- The liaison will curdle if it boilsThis is the hinge of the second dish. Once the beaten yolks go in, the sauce must never come back to a simmer — temper a ladle of hot sauce into the yolks first, return the mixture off the heat, and warm it only to the point where it coats a spoon, around 180F.
- "A casserole of rice"Not a baking dish. This is a moulded rice case — a ring or shell of firm cooked rice pressed into a mould, turned out, and filled with the fricassee. A plain buttered rice ring serves the same purpose.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle at the quantity implied is now a luxury out of all proportion to the cut. Preserved truffle peelings, or a handful of sautéed cremini with a few drops of truffle-infused oil added off the heat, keep the dish within reason.
- Seasoning the velouté"Season with salt and sugar" is period practice for balancing a reduced stock sauce; use a very small amount of sugar.
Beef palates were a staple of grand-hotel and country-house cookery through the nineteenth century, appearing in Carême, in Francatelli, and in the classical French repertoire as palais de bœuf — a cheap piece of the head that, once patiently cleaned and braised, took on a soft gelatinous texture prized in fricassees and entrées. Their presence in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection reflects the Waldorf kitchen's grounding in that French tradition, where nothing from a carcass went unused and skill was measured partly by what a cook could do with the unpromising parts. The curried version belongs to a parallel current: Anglo-Indian curry powders and pastes had been sold commercially in Britain and America for decades by then, and hotel menus of the 1890s routinely offered a curry of something as a lunch entrée. Both dishes vanished from American cooking not because they were bad but because head meats left the retail trade, taking the recipes with them.