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Ox-palates a LA Florentine

Ox palates simmered with vegetables, spices, and stock, then sliced and served with polpetti, macaroni, and brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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.

  2. Handle the palates frequently to extract mucus.

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

  4. Clean the palates thoroughly.

Cook the palates

  1. Place the cleaned palates in a stewpan with carrot, onion, celery, parsley, cloves, mace, peppercorns, garlic, tali, and water or stock.

  2. Boil gently for about four hours until tender.

  3. Press the palates between two dishes until cool.

  4. Cut the best parts of the palates into rounds using a circular cutter.

  5. Put the rounds in a stewpan with some of the reduced stock to glaze.

Serve

  1. Make Polpetti with the trimmings, ham, and any other convenient meat.

  2. Fry the Polpetti.

  3. Serve the palates alternately with the Polpetti.

  4. Place macaroni in the center of the dish.

  5. Pour brown sauce around the macaroni and palates.

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
The main meat; long gentle boiling turns its tough connective tissue tender and gelatinous.
Tali
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and helping the palates brown and glaze when reduced.
Ham
Adds salty, savoury meat flavour to the Polpetti, binding the minced mixture with fat.
Macaroni
Provides a starchy base that holds the dish's centre and absorbs the brown sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling gently for about four hours. A gentle simmer lets collagen slowly break down into gelatin, making the palates tender. A hard boil toughens and breaks the skin and meat, so keep the liquid barely bubbling.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, onion, celery, parsley, clove, garlic, butter. 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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