No. 2343

Shells of Beef Palates a la Mariniere

Coquilles de Palais de Boeuf a la Mariniere

Have some beef palates cooked and pressed as explained for a la bechamel (No. 1326), cut them in fillets of a quarter of an inch square by one inch in length. Place in a saucepan two ounces of butter, and some finely chopped shallots and mushrooms; moisten with a little white wine, add a little veloute sauce (No. 415), reduce, season to taste, then add the beef palates, heat and thicken the sauce with egg-yolks and cream. Butter well some shells (Fig. 438), besprinkle over with bread-crumbs and fill them with the above preparation, keeping them slightly dome-shaped on top. Cover with bechamel sauce (No. 409), dredge over some grated bread-crumbs and parmesan cheese, and pour melted butter over the top. Brown them nicely in a warm oven and arrange them on a napkin with green sprigs of parsley around.

← No. 2342 Shells Filled with Shrimps and Oyster Crabs Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2344 Shells of Chicken a la Shaw →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is an assembly recipe: nearly all the work happens before the first line, in the cooking and pressing of the palates and in the two mother sauces it draws on. Read it as a gratin of braised offal in a wine-and-shallot sauce, finished under top heat.

Beef palatesThe hard palate of the ox, sold as "ox palate" if at all; it now requires a special order from a butcher who breaks whole heads, and in many markets it is simply unavailable. It is gelatinous rather than meaty and needs blanching, scraping of the outer skin, then several hours of gentle simmering in stock before it will slice cleanly.
"Cooked and pressed"Pressing of this kind normally means the simmered palates are laid flat under a weight and chilled until firm; No. 1326 is not given here, so the exact method it prescribes cannot be confirmed. Without pressing you cannot cut the tidy quarter-inch by one-inch fillets the recipe asks for.
The two saucesVelouté is a light stock-based sauce, veal or chicken stock thickened with a blond roux; béchamel is the milk version. The recipe gives no quantities, only "a little" velouté; both sauces need to be thick enough to coat before they meet the palates.
Egg yolks and creamThis is the hinge. Once the liaison goes in, the sauce must not return to a boil or the yolks will granulate and the filling will weep in the shells. Temper the yolk-cream mixture with a ladle of hot sauce, stir it back off the heat, and hold it below a simmer.
"Some shells"Coquilles: real scallop shells or the metal and porcelain imitations sold for gratins, roughly four inches across. Small individual gratin dishes work identically. Butter and crumb them as directed so the filling releases.
"A warm oven"The object is colour on the parmesan crust, not further cooking, since the filling goes in hot. A hot oven on an upper rack, or a broiler a few inches away for a few minutes, will do it. Note that the book gives no temperature, and "warm oven" in period usage does not necessarily mean a high one.
"A la mariniere" hereIn this context it signals only the shallot-and-white-wine reduction, not anything to do with mussels. A dry white with some acid - Muscadet, Chablis - reduced almost to a glaze, is what the flavour depends on.
YieldThe recipe gives almost no quantities (two ounces of butter, a little wine, a little velouté), so the number of shells is a matter of judgement rather than calculation; this is first-course service. The napkin and parsley are Ranhofer's standard presentation and can be ignored without loss.

A Little History

Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how completely that kitchen inherited the French professional habit of using every part of the animal in a form the dining room would accept. Beef palate was a standard garniture item in nineteenth-century French cookery, valued less for flavour than for its firm gelatinous bite, which holds its shape in a sauce where a soft offal would collapse. Serving it in shells, masked with béchamel and glazed with parmesan, is the same logic that produced coquilles of shrimp and chicken on the neighbouring pages: the shell portions the dish, browns handsomely, and conceals what is inside. That such a cut appears in a restaurant book rather than a household one is telling; palates demanded a day of preliminary labour that only a brigade could absorb, and they vanished from menus as that kind of kitchen labour became expensive.