Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Paupiettes of Beef Palates
Paupiettes of Beef Palates
Cut off five or six fillets from some cooked beef palates; trim, and cut them into halves. Have ready a salpicon of cooked fine herbs, finished with truffles and thickened with forcemeat, cover the fillets over with it, and roll them round into the shape of paupiettes, fastening them with small skewers. Dip them into well beaten egg, cover with breadcrumbs, and fry in a fryingpan of boiling fat until they are done. Take them out, drain, remove the skewers, place them on a napkin on a dish, in the form of a pyramid, and serve.
This is a garnish-course dish from the era when every part of the animal had a use, and it assumes two things the original does not spell out: that the palates arrive already cooked, and that you have forcemeat and a salpicon on hand from other work in the kitchen.
- Beef palatesThe hard palate from the roof of a steer's mouth, a common butcher's item in the nineteenth century and now essentially a special order. They were generally scalded, the tough outer skin peeled off, then simmered for several hours in seasoned stock until a knife passed through easily; only then could they be trimmed into the "fillets" the recipe starts with.
- PaupietteA thin slice of meat spread with a filling and rolled. Here the word means only the shape and construction: nothing is braised, as it would be for a classical or modern beef paupiette or roulade, and the rolls are crumbed and fried instead.
- SalpiconIngredients cut in small even dice and bound with a sauce or, as here, with forcemeat. "Cooked fine herbs" in books of this period often means a duxelles-type mixture of finely chopped mushroom, shallot and parsley cooked down until dry, which would help stiffen the filling enough to roll, though the recipe does not spell out the ingredients.
- ForcemeatThe recipe does not say which; a veal or chicken farce would be the usual choice. It goes in uncooked, so the paupiettes need to be fried through rather than merely coloured.
- TrufflesChopped fine; in an American kitchen of the 1890s these would most likely have been imported preserved truffles rather than fresh. A tablespoon of chopped preserved truffle or truffle peelings gives the same effect; truffle oil does not, as its aroma dissipates in the fryer.
- Frying temperature"Boiling fat" indicates deep fat at roughly 350 to 375F. Below that the crumb coat absorbs grease before the forcemeat sets; much above it and the outside darkens while the filling is still raw. The recipe gives no time, only "until they are done," so judge by colour and by the filling being cooked through.
- SkewersWooden cocktail picks work; push them in parallel to the roll so they can be drawn out without tearing the crumb. Chilling the rolled paupiettes 30 minutes before breading makes them far easier to handle.
- ServingThe napkin on the dish is a fat blotter, not decoration. Five or six fillets cut into halves give ten to twelve pieces, enough for about four as a first course.
Beef palates were a staple of the classical garnish repertoire, appearing in Carême and Escoffier alike as an inexpensive, gelatinous, faintly veal-like meat that took on whatever it was cooked with. Their presence in a Waldorf book from 1896 is a reminder that a luxury hotel kitchen was also a thrift operation, and that truffle and forcemeat could make an offcut fit for the dining room. The trick of rolling, breading and deep-frying a stuffed slice into a pyramid on a folded napkin is pure late-nineteenth-century service, when, it is often said, a dish's value lay as much in its silhouette on the platter as in its flavour. Palates fell out of American cooking within a generation or two, along with most of the head meats, and are now largely confined to a few regional and non-Western traditions.