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Jelly of Cows' Heels
This is prepared precisely as is calf's-foot jelly. When cooked, made cold, and the fat removed, a quart of ale or wine, the juice and rind of two lemons, a quarter of a pound of sugar and the whites of six eggs are added, and it is then finished like calf's-foot jelly.
This is a cross-reference recipe: it assumes you already have the book's calf's-foot jelly method in front of you, and supplies only the flavouring stage. Read it as the second half of a two-day process.
- What the original leaves outNo quantity of heels, water, or cooking time is given here — all of that sits in the calf's-foot jelly entry. Working from this page alone you cannot judge the proportions, and guessing at them is how you end up with either soup or rubber.
- Cows' heelsBeef feet, split. A butcher will need notice, and they are often sold frozen and already sawn. The recipe itself specifies nothing; as a rough working guide, two large feet, well scrubbed and blanched first to remove scum, will yield something like two quarts of strong stock after five or six hours of bare simmering.
- The hinge: never let it boil hardA rolling boil emulsifies fat and fine particles into the liquid and no amount of clarifying will pull them back out. Keep it at a lazy tremble the whole way, and skim.
- Clarifying with egg whitesThe whites go in cold, with the liquid melted but not hot, and are whisked in before heat is applied. Bring it up slowly without stirring once the raft forms, hold it a minute or two, then ladle through a scalded jelly bag or several layers of cheesecloth. Let it drip; squeezing the bag clouds the jelly.
- A quart of ale or wineThat is four cups, which is a great deal of alcohol. Some of it cooks off during clarifying but by no means all. A modern cook making this for an invalid or a child should leave it out and lengthen with more lemon and a little water.
- Weights and measuresA quarter pound of sugar is about half a cup. "The rind of two lemons" most likely means the yellow rind pared off in strips, which would be added during the reheating and strained out with the raft, rather than grated peel left in the finished jelly; the recipe does not say.
- SettingPour into a mould or into individual glasses and chill overnight. Foot stock sets firmly on its own; if a test spoonful chilled on a saucer stays syrupy, the stock was under-reduced and needs boiling down before the flavourings go in.
- YieldSince no quantity of stock is specified here, the yield depends entirely on the calf's-foot jelly entry; working from a couple of quarts of stock you would get roughly that much finished jelly, or a dozen or so small servings.
Calf's-foot jelly was the standard invalid food of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this entry is the thrifty version of it: cows' heels were far cheaper than calves' feet and were often said to give a stronger, coarser gelatine. The logic behind it was that a patient too weak to chew could still take concentrated animal protein in a form that slipped down easily, and the belief that meat jelly was strengthening long outlasted any evidence for it — collagen is in fact a poor protein source. The lemon, sugar and wine are there to make a fundamentally savoury extract palatable, and the wine also served as a mild stimulant, which is why a sick-room recipe of this period reaches for ale without comment.