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Pickled Beef Palates
Wash four palates, put them in a saucepan with a bunch of sweet herbs, three blades of mace, two or three cloves, and one quart of water, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper. Boil the palates till quite tender (they will take about five hours), then drain, and remove their skins, keeping them covered until cold. Put one and one-half pints of vinegar and an equal quantity of white wine into a saucepan with the mace that was previously boiled with the palates, four cloves, and a few peppercorns, and boil for ten minutes; then remove from the fire and leave until cold. Put the palates in an earthenware jar with two bay leaves, five or six peppercorns, and a blade of mace, then pour the pickle over them. Tie paper over the top of the jar, and keep it for use in a store cupboard.
An Edwardian hotel-kitchen preparation of an offal cut that has all but disappeared from retail butchery. The cooking is straightforward; the preserving method is the problem, and it is not one that can be patched.
- Why it fails: an unmeasured cure held at room temperatureCooked beef is a low-acid food. Here it is covered with vinegar cut roughly half-and-half with white wine, which has been boiled (driving off some acetic acid) and then left to cool, and the jar is stored in a cupboard rather than chilled. Nothing in the recipe fixes the final acidity, so there is no assurance the contents sit below pH 4.6 — the line that keeps Clostridium botulinum from growing in an anaerobic jar.
- Why it fails: paper is not a sealA sheet of paper tied over an earthenware jar keeps out dust and flies and nothing else. It is neither sterile nor airtight, and the meat was handled — skinned by hand — after cooking and before packing. If you want pickled meat, use a current tested recipe with measured acid and refrigerated storage.
- Palates themselvesBeef palate is the hard upper roof of the ox's mouth, sold as an offal cut in the period and now essentially absent from supermarkets. Where it is available at all it comes from specialty or halal butchers, often frozen, and the five-hour boil in the original reflects how much collagen has to break down before the skin will peel.
- "A bunch of sweet herbs"The standard Victorian bundle: parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, sometimes with marjoram or a strip of celery. Not a fixed formula — cooks of the period assumed you knew what was in the kitchen.
- Blades of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg; a "blade" is one dried fragment of it, not a spoonful of ground mace. Three blades is a mild, warm background note, and ground mace substituted volume-for-volume will overwhelm the dish.
- Quantities in plain termsOne quart of water is about 950 ml; one and a half pints of vinegar and the same of wine is roughly 700 ml each, taking the pints as US measure. Note that the liquid is scaled to four palates, which yields a small quantity of meat for a great deal of pickle.
- What it was forPickled palate appears to have been used sliced thin as a garnish or cold hors d'oeuvre, or dropped into ragouts and made dishes, rather than served by the plateful, so a jar could be expected to stand for some time in a cool nineteenth-century larder — a storage assumption that no modern kitchen reproduces.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) was compiled by the Waldorf's famous maître d'hôtel at a moment when American hotel kitchens still worked in the French classical idiom, and that idiom used the whole animal. Beef palate — palais de boeuf — was prized less for flavour than for texture: long boiling turns it gelatinous and faintly springy, and cooks valued it in ragouts, timbales and cold garnishes where a little of it went a long way. Pickling in spiced vinegar is often said to have been a common way to hold such a cut in the days before mechanical refrigeration was universal, and the store cupboard and paper-tied earthenware jar in these instructions suggest an older domestic order. Palate has largely vanished from English-language cookbooks, along with lights, elder and other offal that later butchery stopped bothering to dress.