No. 2390

Tourte of Palate of Beef, Parisian Style

Tourte de Palais de Boeuf a la Parisienne

Prepar, cook and press the palates of beef as described in a la bechamel (No. 1326), then cut them in one and a half inch squares. Heat half a pound of lard, brown in it two ounces of finely chopped onions, and half a pound of chopped mushrooms; add the palates, season with salt, pepper, chopped chives and parsley; drain off the grease, and add to it half its quantity of godiveau forcemeat (No. 82) quenelles and increase the garnishing by adding and espagnole sauce (No. 414) finished with Madeira. Prepare an empty tart, ancient style (No. 174); when the tart is done, raise up the cover, remove the paper pad, and fill the interior with the above garnishing, and replace the cover before serving.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A late-Victorian composed entrée that assumes three sub-recipes are already in hand: cooked beef palates, godiveau quenelles and espagnole sauce. Read it as an assembly sheet rather than a standalone recipe.

Beef palate is the hingePalate is the lining of an ox's mouth: tough, gelatinous, and edible only after long wet cooking. Ranhofer sends you to No. 1326 to prepare, cook and press it; the standard treatment of the period is blanching and scraping off the outer skin, long simmering or braising until a knife passes through easily, then pressing flat under a weight so it cuts into neat squares. Undercooked palate is rubbery and no amount of sauce redeems it. It is now generally a special order from a butcher who breaks whole heads.
Half a pound of lardThat is a full cup, and it is a frying medium, not an ingredient — the instruction to "drain off the grease" means nearly all of it goes. Two or three tablespoons of any fat will brown the onion and mushrooms adequately.
The garbled sentenceThe line about "half its quantity of godiveau forcemeat quenelles and increase the garnishing by adding and espagnole sauce" is corrupt in the printed text. The sense is: bind the palates with espagnole finished with Madeira, and extend the filling with poached godiveau quenelles equal to about half the volume of palate.
Godiveau and espagnoleGodiveau (No. 82) is a veal-and-suet forcemeat bound with egg and iced water, piped or spooned into small quenelles and poached in barely simmering salted water. Espagnole (No. 414) is the old brown mother sauce built on brown roux and veal stock reduced over hours; a well-reduced brown stock or good demi-glace stands in without embarrassment.
"Empty tart, ancient style"A raised pie: stiff paste moulded into a straight-sided case with a separate pastry lid, blind-baked around a paper-wrapped pad or dummy filling that holds the walls upright. The pad comes out once the shell has set, which is why the cover is cut free and lifted. A tall springform-lined hot-water-crust case will do the same job; Ranhofer gives no oven temperature, so judge by the crust.
Assemble at the last momentThe shell is baked empty and filled only just before it goes to table, so the pastry stays crisp. Have the filling hot and the case hot, fill, cap, and send it out immediately.
YieldRanhofer gives none, and specifies no quantity of palate either. As a rough guess, a pound of cooked palate with quenelles and sauce would fill a shell serving six to eight as one course in a long menu.

A Little History

Beef palate belongs to the vanished middle ground of nineteenth-century butchery, neither prime cut nor pure offal: cheap, gelatinous, almost tasteless on its own, and therefore useful to a kitchen whose whole art lay in sauce. Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives it a number of treatments edash à la béchamel, in salad, fried in batter, and here in a raised pie. The name marks the style rather than the origin: "à la Parisienne" is often taken to signal a brown Madeira sauce with quenelles, the standard grammar of the Paris restaurant kitchens where Ranhofer trained. The "tourte, ancient style" is older still, generally traced to the medieval standing pie whose thick crust is said to have begun as a cooking vessel and to have survived into the age of ovens as a piece of table architecture. Palate has since disappeared from American retail butchery almost entirely, which is the plainest measure of how far the whole-carcass habit has receded.