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Calf's Feet and Sauce
Thoroughly cleanse two calf's feet; place them in a saucepan, and pour over them three pints of cold water. Let them simmer gently for four hours, then split them in halves, and trim nicely, cut them into neat pieces, and drain the water from them. Take a cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, mix with them a small onion well chopped, a little grated nutmeg, a salt-spoonful of salt, and a third of a salt-spoonful of pepper. Dip the pieces into egg, then into the crumbs, and fry them in boiling oil or butter until nicely browned. Put them in the middle of a hot dish, with a sauce round them made as follows. Chop finely three large onions, three large mushrooms, and three tomatoes. Put these into a saucepan with a grain of powdered ginger, a quarter of a nutmeg grated, a salt-spoonful of salt, the same of mustard, a little cayenne, a small piece of sugar, and a glassful of white wine. Simmer gently, stirring all the time, till the onions are tender. Time to stew the feet, four hours. Probable cost, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian way of using a cheap gelatinous cut: long-simmered calf's feet, crumbed and fried, with a sharp onion-tomato sauce poured round. Nothing here is difficult, but the shopping and the two-stage cooking need planning.
- Sourcing the feetCalf's feet are a butcher's order now, usually split on request and often frozen. Pig's trotters behave almost identically in the pot, if slightly fattier, and are far easier to find.
- The long simmer is the pointFour hours at a bare tremble is what turns the connective tissue soft and leaves the pieces sticky enough to hold crumbs. A rolling boil will shred the meat off the bone and cloud the liquid. Do not shorten it.
- Chill before crumbingThe recipe has you trim and crumb straight from the pot, which is awkward with something this hot and slippery. Cooling the pieces until the gelatin sets makes them firm, easy to cut into neat squares, and much less likely to shed their coating in the pan.
- Keep the cooking liquidThe three pints reduce to an intensely gelatinous stock. The original drains it away; it sets to a firm jelly in the refrigerator and is worth keeping for soups or for a proper aspic.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon is the small spoon of a Victorian cruet set, usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon. So roughly 1/4 tsp salt and about 1/12 tsp pepper in the crumbs, and 1/4 tsp each of salt and mustard in the sauce.
- "A grain of ginger" and "a glassful"A grain here most likely means a pinch rather than the apothecary's weight. A glassful of white wine in Victorian receipts is usually reckoned at around 2 fl oz, though the book does not define it; a quarter of a nutmeg grated is close to 1/2 tsp, which is assertive but in keeping with the period.
- Frying"Boiling oil" points to fat at deep-frying heat; in modern terms something like 350-375F, though the book gives no temperature. Butter alone will brown too fast for the time the crumbs need; clarified butter, or oil with a knob of butter added at the end, gives the same flavour without burning.
- The sauce needs helpThree onions, three mushrooms and three tomatoes with only a glass of wine will catch unless the pan is heavy and the heat very low. A few spoonfuls of the reserved cooking liquid loosen it and thicken it at the same time.
- YieldThree or four servings, as stated, as a main course with something plain alongside.
Calf's feet were a staple of nineteenth-century thrift cookery for one reason: they are almost pure collagen, and a long simmer yields the gelatin that set many of the jellies and raised pies of the era, before packaged leaf and powdered gelatin became cheap and reliable. The recipe gives the cost as fourpence to eightpence each, which puts them among the cheapest things at the butcher's. This treatment, egg-and-crumbed and fried with a spiced onion sauce, belongs to a family of English dishes designed to make gelatinous offcuts palatable as a hot dish rather than merely a source of stock, and the sauce's ginger, mustard, cayenne and nutmeg reflect a house style that leaned hard on spice to lift bland material. The same logic survives in the French pieds panés, where the foot is still crumbed and fried rather than discarded.