No. 1326

Beef Palates a la Bechamel

Palais de Boeuf a la Bechamel

Remove the black parts from twelve beef palates; soak them in warm water, adding a little salt. Place them on a slow fire and when the white skin can be detached, then drain and scrape them with a knife in order to remove properly the skin adhering to the palate. Throw them as soon as done into cold water, then drain them, and put them to cook in some broth (No. 194a), adding a bunch of parsley, finely minced carrots, onions stuck with cloves. Leave them to cook for five or six hours, then drain and lay them under a weight. Cut them in one and a quarter inch squares, then prepare a bechamel sauce (No. 409), neither too thick nor too thin, warm the palates in the sauce, season with salt and ground pepper, and stir in a piece of butter just when ready to serve.

← No. 1325 Oxtails with Vegetables Beef No. 1327 Beef Palates Baked, Chevreuse →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade, a stockpot always on the fire, and a butcher who will sell you a dozen beef palates. The method itself is simple: a long soak and blanch to strip the skin, a very long braise, then a press and a sauce.

Sourcing the palatesBeef palate is the roof of the ox's mouth, sold occasionally by halal, Latin American and Chinese butchers and by whole-animal suppliers; it will not be in a supermarket case. Twelve is a professional quantity for a hotel service — two or three should be roughly enough for four people once trimmed.
The hinge: skinningEverything depends on getting the tough outer skin off cleanly. The warm-water soak and the slow initial heating are not cooking, they are loosening; test frequently and pull the pan off the moment the white skin lifts at a corner, then scrape while the palate is still warm. Skin left on stays leathery no matter how long the braise runs.
"A slow fire"A bare simmer, with the water never breaking into a rolling boil; the aim at this stage is to loosen the skin rather than to cook the palate.
The brothRanhofer sends you to his own broth, No. 194a. An unsalted or lightly salted chicken or veal stock stands in; the aromatics he names — parsley bunch, minced carrot, onion stuck with cloves — are a standard French braising garnish and are worth keeping.
Five or six hoursThat is not an exaggeration for palate, which is almost entirely collagen and needs long, low heat to turn gelatinous. A covered pot in a 300F oven holds the temperature more reliably than a burner. A pressure cooker will get there in roughly an hour at high pressure, though the texture is slightly looser.
PressingLaying the cooked palates under a weight while they cool compacts them and makes them possible to cut into neat squares. A sheet pan with a few cans on top, refrigerated overnight, does the job; cut cold, then reheat in the sauce.
BéchamelBechamel -- No. 409 is Ranhofer's bechamel. "Neither too thick nor too thin" means it should coat a spoon and slide off — thick enough to cling to the squares, loose enough to pool slightly on the plate.
Finishing butterThe butter stirred in at the last moment is monter au beurre; keep the sauce below a boil afterward. Ranhofer specifies salt and ground pepper; white pepper will keep the sauce paler if that matters to you.
Yield and serviceAs written this is a chafing-dish or entrée course for a dozen or more. Serve hot in a shallow dish, with rice, toast points or plain boiled potatoes; it is bland by design and wants a sharp pickle or mustard alongside.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in one volume — which is why beef palates turn up here at all. Palate was standard European garde-manger material through the nineteenth century: cheap, gelatinous, endlessly labor-intensive, and therefore ideal for a kitchen with more cooks than money to spend on prime cuts. It appears constantly in Carême and Escoffier as well, diced into ragoûts, cut into rounds for garnishing entrées, or crumbed and fried. Its disappearance from American cooking probably has less to do with taste than with changes in the meat trade — the head is often said to have stopped reaching the retail butcher as slaughter industrialised — and with the sheer number of hours between a raw palate and a plate of it. The béchamel treatment is the plainest way of handling it.