No. 858

Cannelons Oe Beef Palate or Lambs' Sweetbreads and Celery

Cannelons de Palais de Boeuf ou de Ris d'Agneau et Celeri

Cut eighth of an inch square pieces from a cold braised and pressed beef palate, add to it an equal quantity of mushrooms and half as many truffles, then mix this salpicon with a well reduced allemande sauce (No. 407). Roll out some eight-turn puff paste to the thickness of one sixteenth of an inch, wet this paste slightly and cut it into half inch wide bands. Butter the exterior of some cylindrical molds, one and a quarter inches in diameter by two and a half inches long; apply the bands on to these, turning them around so that half the paste of one row overlaps half of the last one, and continue until the cylinder is well covered; egg them over twice and cook them in a hot oven, remove, unmold and place each on a square of buttered paper, fill with some chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89), garnish the center with the above prepared salpicon, and finish the bottom and top with more forcemeat, then set them in a moderate oven for ten minutes. Range them on folded napkins and serve. Instead of beef palates, lamb sweetbreads and celery mixed with an allemande sauce, may be substituted and finished exactly the same.

← No. 857 Canapes of Sweetbreads Hot Side Dishes No. 859 Cannelons with Puree of Chicken or Game →

For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's-era hot side dish: puff paste wound around metal tubes, baked hollow, then filled with forcemeat and a diced ragout. Most of the work is in the components Ranhofer assumes you already have on the stove.

The hinge: butter the outside of the moldsThe paste is wrapped around the exterior of the tubes, not lining the inside, and it must be unmolded while still hot or the tube will not slide free. Cream-horn or cannoli molds of roughly 1¼ inches by 2½ inches are the modern equivalent, and they should be buttered generously.
Oven temperaturesA "hot oven" for puff paste is 425-450F; bake until the spirals are set and deep gold. The final ten-minute pass in a "moderate oven" is 350F, only long enough to set the quenelle forcemeat through.
Eight-turn puff pasteEight turns means eight folding operations of a standard butter-and-flour laminated dough, more turns than the six common in many modern recipes. Bought all-butter puff pastry works, rolled to about 1/16 inch, thin enough that the overlapping bands do not bake into a solid wall.
Beef palateThe roof of the ox's mouth, once a common braising cut, is hard to find in North American retail now and requires scalding, peeling of the tough outer membrane, and several hours of braising before it is pressed and chilled. The recipe's own alternative, lamb sweetbreads with celery, is the practical route.
Sweetbreads, if you take the substitutionSoak in several changes of cold water to draw the blood, blanch briefly, peel the membrane, then press under a weighted plate until firm enough to dice cleanly. Cook them through; undercooked sweetbread has an unpleasant slack texture.
Allemande sauceRanhofer's No. 407 is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison, reduced hard. The reduction matters more than the pedigree: a loose sauce will soak the pastry from inside and collapse the cylinder. It should mound on a spoon.
Salpicon proportionsEqual parts diced meat and mushroom, half as much truffle, all cut to a scant 1/8 inch. Fresh truffle is a substantial expense here; a small amount of preserved truffle or, frankly, more mushroom with a spoonful of truffle juice will not disgrace the dish.
Quenelle forcemeatThe chicken forcemeat of No. 89 is raw breast pounded with panada and cream. Keep everything cold in a food processor and it will set firm in the second bake.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives none; something in the range of eight to twelve cannelons from a pound of pastry, two per person, is a reasonable guess. They are ranged on folded napkins and should go out immediately -- the pastry softens within minutes of being filled.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "hot side dishes" are the small made dishes that filled the course between fish and roast at a long service dinner. Cannelon comes from the French for a pipe or tube, and the technique of winding pastry bands around a buttered metal cylinder was standard in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, producing a hollow case that could be filled to order. The beef palate is the telling detail: braised, pressed and diced, it was valued for its gelatinous texture and its cheapness, and it appears throughout French kitchen literature of the period alongside other cuts — calf's ears, cockscombs, lamb's brains — that a fashionable restaurant could turn into something expensive-tasting. That it now has to be explained, while the truffles beside it need no introduction, is a fair measure of how the hierarchy of ingredients has shifted.