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Ox-palates a LA Florentine

Ox Palates à la Florentine is a slow‑cooked ox palate dish served with Polpetti and macaroni, finished with Italian or brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Ox-palates a LA Florentine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the palates

  1. Soak the ox palates in water with a good handful of coarse sea salt for several hours, handling them frequently to extract mucus.

  2. Parboil the palates in salted water until the skin is easily scraped off.

  3. Clean thoroughly and place them in a stewpan with carrot, onion, celery, parsley, cloves, mace, peppercorns, garlic, salt, and water or stock.

  4. Boil gently for about four hours until tender, then press between two dishes until cold.

Glaze and make the Polpetti

  1. Cut the best parts into circular pieces using a cutter the size of a crown coin.

  2. Put the pieces in a stewpan with some of the reduced stock to glaze.

  3. Make Polpetti with the trimmings, ham, and any other convenient meat, crumb and fry them.

Serve

  1. Serve the palates alternately with the Polpetti, placing macaroni a la Milanaise in the center.

  2. Pour Italian or brown sauce around the base and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ox palates
Main protein; long gentle simmering turns the tough connective tissue tender.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the Polpetti made from trimmings.
Crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating on the Polpetti when fried.

The step that matters

Boil gently for about four hours until tender. A rolling boil toughens and breaks up the meat, while a gentle simmer slowly converts collagen into gelatin, leaving the palates tender and the stock rich. Keep the liquid barely moving.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove, garlic, ham):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove, garlic, ham. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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