Boil 2 pounds of beef and 2 pig's feet in 4 quarts of water; season with salt and pepper. Let boil well. Add 1 head of lettuce, ½ head of cabbage, a few thin slices of pumpkin, 2 carrots and 1 clove of garlic, all cut fine, and 1 herb bouquet. Let all cook until tender; then add ½ can of peas. Remove the meat; cut into thin slices; season, and serve with the soup.
This is a one-pot boiled dinner in the mould of Portugal's cozido, written down in the loose shorthand of 1900s community cookbooks. The original assumes you know that the meat and feet need hours before the vegetables go anywhere near the pot.
- The hinge: stagger the potBeef and pig's feet need roughly 2½ to 3 hours at a bare simmer before they are tender. The original does stage the pot -- meats first, "let boil well," then the vegetables -- but gives no times, and lettuce and pumpkin put in too early will dissolve into nothing. Add the vegetables for the final 30-40 minutes.
- Pig's feetThey are there for gelatine and body, not for eating, though the skin and cartilage are good if you like them. Ask a butcher to split them lengthwise; supermarkets rarely carry them but Latin American and Asian markets do. Two feet in four quarts should give enough body that the broth sets softly when chilled, especially once it has reduced.
- What cut of beefUnspecified "beef" in a long-boiled dish like this would generally have been a cheap boiling cut — shin, brisket, chuck or short rib. A lean roasting cut will be dry and stringy after three hours.
- Herb bouquetA bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string or bundled in a leek leaf. Fish it out before serving.
- PumpkinNot the stringy jack-o'-lantern sort. Use a dense winter squash — kabocha, butternut or a sugar pumpkin — cut into slices about half an inch thick. It will partly break down and thicken the broth, which is the point.
- Half a can of peasCanned-goods sizes were not standardised at this date, so "half a can" is approximate; reckon on something like a cup of drained peas. Frozen peas are the sensible substitute; add them in the last two or three minutes so they stay green.
- Skim and season lateSkim the grey foam in the first twenty minutes, and hold back most of the salt until the end. Four quarts reduces considerably over three hours and an early-seasoned pot turns brackish.
- YieldServes six to eight generously as a full meal, the sliced meat plated alongside or in the bowl.
The dish belongs to the cozido family — the Portuguese boiled dinner in which meats, sausage and whatever vegetables the garden holds cook in one pot, the meat and vegetables often brought to the table on a platter and the broth sometimes taken as a separate soup course. The version here has been simplified for an American kitchen: no chouriço, no morcela, no chickpeas, and canned peas standing in for fresh. That trimming is characteristic of the "dishes of all nations" genre, a popular format around the turn of the twentieth century in which a national label was attached to a recipe that had been quietly adapted for domestic-science-era cooks and their grocers. The pig's feet are among the more traditional elements in it: in Portuguese cooking, as in French, cheap gelatinous cuts were a common way to give a long-boiled broth weight without stock or thickening.