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How To Cook Pig's Feet
Clean the feet well and soak until very white. Wrap each foot in a piece of cloth-tieing it well with a cord. Boil them three or four hours; let them remain in the cloths till needed. When cooked in this way they will be found very delicate and tender, and are nice for frying, broiling or pickling.
A preparatory recipe rather than a finished dish: it produces tender, intact trotters ready to be fried, broiled, or pickled. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of heat control.
- Never let it boilDespite the wording, hold the water at a bare shiver, 180-190F, for the whole time. A rolling boil shreds the skin and connective tissue off the bones, which defeats the entire purpose of wrapping the feet in cloth.
- Why the clothTrotters collapse as their collagen turns to gelatin. Wrapping each one in muslin or cheesecloth and tying it with kitchen twine keeps the foot in one piece so it can be sliced or halved later. Wrap snugly, not tightly, and tie at both ends.
- Cleaning and "soak until very white"This means several hours or overnight in cold water, changed once or twice, to draw out blood. Butcher-prepared feet today usually arrive scraped and split, but check for remaining bristles and singe them off over a flame before soaking.
- Three or four hours is rightUnlike many long Victorian times, this one stands. Trotters need three to four hours at a simmer before the tendon and rind go soft; undercooked they are rubbery, and there is no shortcut short of a pressure cooker at roughly 45-60 minutes.
- The cooking liquidThe recipe gives plain water. Adding an onion, a few peppercorns, a bay leaf and a good spoonful of salt costs nothing and makes the meat worth eating on its own. Keep the feet submerged throughout.
- "Let them remain in the cloths till needed"Cool them in their liquid, still wrapped, then refrigerate. They firm up considerably as the gelatin sets, which is what makes them sliceable for frying or broiling. Use within three days, or freeze.
- FinishingFor frying, halve the cooled feet lengthwise, dredge in seasoned flour or dip in egg and crumbs, and fry until browned; for broiling, brush with butter or mustard and crumb them. Both steps are only about colour and crust, since the meat is already fully cooked.
- PicklingThe recipe mentions pickling but gives no brine, no proportions and no processing. Treat any pickled trotters as a refrigerated preparation with a fresh vinegar recipe, not a shelf-stable one.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. A whole foot per person as a main course, or half a foot as part of a larger plate, is a reasonable allowance; four feet will generally fit in a large stockpot.
Pig's feet belong to the long tradition of using every part of a slaughtered animal, and they persisted in American cookbooks after other offal had fallen out of fashion, being cheap, gelatinous and forgiving. Household manuals of this period often gave a base method rather than a finished dish, on the assumption that the cook already knew several ways to serve the result: fried for breakfast, broiled with mustard, or set in spiced vinegar as pickled feet, which were a familiar saloon and lunch-counter item in the United States in the earlier twentieth century. Wrapping meat in cloth to keep it whole while boiling was not new with this book; it turns up in earlier English cookery writing as a general method. What the recipe assumes without saying is a household with direct access to a butcher, or one buying pork in large pieces, where feet came along with the rest of the animal and had to be dealt with.