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Pigs'-Feet Souse
Cut off the horny parts of feet and toes, scrape, clean, and wash thoroughly, singe off the stray hairs, place in a kettle with plenty of water, boil, skim, pour off water and add fresh, and boil until the bones will pull out easily; do not bone, but pack in a stone jar with pepper and salt sprinkled between each layer; cover with good cider vinegar. When wanted for the table, take out a sufficient quantity, put in a hot skillet, add more vinegar, salt, and pepper if needed, boil until thoroughly heated, stir in a smooth thickening of flour and water, and boil until flour is cooked; serve hot as a nice breakfast dish. Or, when the feet have boiled until perfectly tender, remove the bones and pack in stone jar as above; slice down cold when wanted for use. Let the liquor in which the feet are boiled stand over night; in the morning remove the fat and prepare and preserve for use as directed in the Medical Department.
This is a room-temperature meat preserve with no measured acid, no measured salt and no sealed container, and that is the part that cannot be carried into a modern kitchen. The notes below explain the vocabulary and the technique, and why the storage step fails present standards.
- Why the storage step failsCooked pork packed in a crock and simply "covered with cider vinegar" is an unmeasured acidification. Nineteenth-century cider vinegar varied widely in strength, the meat's own juices dilute it further, and the interior of a packed layer may never reach a pH low enough to hold. Low-acid meat held for weeks in an uncertain acid at cellar temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum; the toxin is odourless and tasteless, and although prolonged boiling destroys the toxin itself, the recipe's second method is sliced down and eaten cold. Use a current tested recipe for pickled pigs' feet if you want the dish.
- The stone jarA glazed earthenware crock, kept in a cool cellar or springhouse and covered with a cloth or plate rather than sealed. The recipe assumes it will be reopened repeatedly for portions; it is not a canning vessel in any modern sense.
- SouseFrom the old sense of souse meaning pickling liquor or brine, a word that reaches English through Old French from a Germanic term for brine; it is only distantly connected to "sauce" by way of the salt root behind both. It refers to the vinegar keep, not to any particular cut, which is why you also find souse made from ears, snouts and head meat.
- "Horny parts of feet and toes"The hoof wall and dewclaws. Butchers today generally sell trotters already split and scalded, so the scraping and singeing described here is rarely needed.
- Two long boilsPouring off the first water and starting fresh is not fussiness — the first liquid carries off scum, blood and much of the strong flavour. "Until the bones will pull out easily" means genuinely long cooking, in the range of three to four hours for trotters.
- The skillet finishThe first serving method is essentially a vinegar fricassee thickened with a raw flour-and-water slurry, and the instruction to "boil until flour is cooked" matters: undercooked slurry tastes pasty. The recipe presents it as a hot breakfast dish.
- The reserved liquorThe pot liquid is rich in gelatin and fat. The recipe sends the fat skimmed cold from the top to the "Medical Department" of Buckeye Cookery rather than to the table — the book treats a pig as having no waste parts at all.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio in 1877, compiled from contributions by Midwestern housewives, and its meat chapter can be read in light of the autumn hog killing: a whole animal arrives at once and every part must be committed to a keeping method within days. Souse is one of those methods, and it is old: vinegar is documented in English and German household cookery long before it reached the Ohio valley, and the Pennsylvania German settlers who moved west carried the practice with them alongside scrapple and head cheese. What distinguishes this version is its double life: the same crock yields a hot, thickened, vinegary breakfast dish or, if the bones are pulled first, a cold jellied loaf to slice. Both depended on a cool cellar and on a household that would empty the jar quickly.