Made with braised beef palate pressed under a weight reducing it to three-sixteenths of an inch in thickness; cut a pound of this into small squares, and half a pound of mushrooms cut into the same sized pieces; cover this salpicon with a pint and a half of well seasoned allemande sauce (407), and finish the same as the sweetbread croquettes (No. 893).
Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with a stockpot of allemande already at hand and cross-references two other numbers rather than repeating himself. The whole success of the dish is in the binding sauce: it must be thick enough to slice cold.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its long run of croquette numbers shows how a nineteenth-century kitchen turned yesterday's braising into today's service. Beef palate seems to have been familiar restaurant material then, a cheap and gelatinous cut that rewards long cooking with a texture nothing else quite matches; it turns up in French professional cookery of the period, and appears to have largely faded from American and British menus by the middle of the twentieth century as offal narrowed to liver and kidney. The croquette itself seems to have been widely popular in the era, at Delmonico's and in the domestic manuals alike, precisely because it converted trimmings into something that looked deliberate. The name is generally traced to the French croquer, to crunch.