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Calf's Foot, Baked or Stewed
Wash a calf's foot very carefully, and rub it over with pepper, salt, and a little powdered cinnamon. Place it in a saucepan or dish, and cover it with a pint and a half of water. The knuckle-bone of a ham, the end of a dried tongue, or even a few pieces of beef may be added, with a little celery, an onion stuck with four or five cloves, and a carrot. Let these simmer either in the oven or on the fire for three or four hours. In either case they must be closely covered. When quite tender, take out the bones, and cut the meat into neat pieces. Strain the gravy, skimming off the fat, add to it a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and thicken it with a dessert-spoonful of ground rice. Let it boil up, then put in the pieces of meat, a squeeze of lemon-juice, a glass of white wine, and serve hot. Probable cost, 4d. to 8d. per foot. One foot will be found sufficient for one or two persons.
A gelatinous braise of the kind that once used up every part of the animal. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the ingredients and measures need translating.
- Sourcing the footCalf's feet are a special order from a butcher or a halal or Latin American market; they are usually sold split lengthwise, which is what you want. Pig's trotters behave much the same way and are far easier to find. Scrub well and check for stray hair, singeing it off over a flame.
- Oven temperatureIf you braise it in the oven rather than on the hob, 300F (150C) will hold the liquid at the bare simmer the recipe asks for. A tight lid matters: a pint and a half of water is not much liquid for three or four hours, and an uncovered dish will run dry.
- TimingThree to four hours is the minimum. The foot is done when the skin and connective tissue slide off the bone with no resistance; some feet want five hours. Undercooked, it is rubbery rather than tender.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons, so the ground rice is a modest thickener rather than a paste. A tablespoon is close enough to the modern one for this purpose.
- A glass of white wineIn Victorian cookery books a wine-glass is usually reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, though "a glass" is loose. Add it with enough time to boil off the raw edge before serving.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup but a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain and online. A teaspoon or two of soy sauce plus a dash of Worcestershire gives a similar savoury depth if you cannot get it.
- Ground riceA coarsely milled rice, close enough to rice flour for thickening; both are widely sold, including in Asian groceries. Slake it in a little cold stock before adding, or it will lump. The braising liquid is already heavy with gelatin, so it will thicken considerably on its own as it cools.
- SkimmingThe fat comes off far more cleanly if you strain the gravy and chill it; the fat sets in a firm cap you can lift off whole. The jelly beneath is worth keeping even if you make nothing else from the foot.
- YieldOne foot serves one or two, as stated, but the meat yield is small relative to the work. Two feet in the same pot, with the ham knuckle, makes a more sensible dinner for four.
Calf's foot earned its place in Victorian kitchens for its gelatin rather than its meat: boiled down, it gave the stock that set calf's-foot jelly, the standard restorative fed to invalids and convalescents through the nineteenth century. Cassell's, published for the middle-class household that had a cook but watched the bills, prices this dish at fourpence to eightpence a foot, which puts it among the cheaper meat dishes in the book. The additions the recipe suggests are all thrift items too, in that they are things already in the larder: a ham knuckle-bone, the dry end of a tongue, a few scraps of beef. Mushroom ketchup, the seasoning called for here, was established in English kitchens well before tomato ketchup and functioned as a general savoury sharpener before commercial bottled sauces crowded it out. The trade in feet and trotters seems to have receded from British and American butchers over the twentieth century, as cheap boneless cuts became the norm, though it never went away in Chinese, Caribbean and Latin American cooking.