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Calf's Foot, Curried
Prepare two feet as in the last recipe, remove the bones, and cut the meat into neatly-shaped pieces. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a stewpan. Let it melt; slice into it two large onions and a sour apple. Stir these over the fire till soft, then rub them through a sieve. Mix with the pulp a table-spoonful of curry paste, and also a little ground rice. Add, gradually, sufficient of the liquid in which the feet were boiled to moisten the whole without making it too thin, put in the meat, the onions, and pepper and salt to taste. Simmer all gently together for a few minutes; then pile the curry in the centre of a hot dish with a border of rice round it. Time to boil the feet, four hours; to simmer, quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian economy curry built on the gelatine of long-boiled calf's feet. The technique is sound; the main obstacles are sourcing the feet and decoding a few unstated quantities.
- "As in the last recipe"The missing step is the boiling of the cleaned, split feet until the meat leaves the bone — the four hours given at the end. Keep that cooking liquid: it is the sauce base, and it will set to a jelly when cold.
- Sourcing the feetCalf's feet are a special order from a butcher in most places now. Pig's trotters are the usual stand-in and give a similarly gelatinous, slippery-textured meat; you may need more than two trotters to match two calf's feet, which the recipe puts at three or four servings.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian cookbooks used the egg as a volume measure constantly, though it is a rough guide rather than an exact one.
- Curry paste, not powderNineteenth-century commercial curry pastes were thick and oily preserves, generally closer to a modern jarred curry paste than to loose curry powder. If you substitute powder, fry it in the butter with the onions rather than stirring it into the cold pulp, or it will taste raw and dusty.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice used as a thickener, still sold as ground rice or rice flour. A rounded teaspoon or two is enough here; it thickens less aggressively than flour and will not cloud the sauce.
- Rubbing through a sieveA food mill or a short blitz with a stick blender does the same job in seconds. Cook the onions and apple gently until genuinely collapsed first — browning them changes the character of the dish, which is meant to be mild and pale.
- "Put in the meat, the onions"The onions are already in the sieved purée, so the phrase reads as redundant. Take it as the meat alone going back into the sauce.
- The fifteen-minute simmerThat is all the meat needs, since it is already fully cooked; note that the body of the recipe says only 'a few minutes' while the time line gives a quarter of an hour. Longer and the pieces lose their shape.
- The rice borderPlain boiled long-grain rice, pressed into a ring around the edge of a hot platter. The presentation is period; the curry can equally be spooned over rice in bowls.
Calf's feet were among the cheapest things a Victorian cook could buy — the probable cost of a shilling here covers a dish for four — and they were valued less for flavour than for the gelatine that made calf's-foot jelly a standard invalid food. Cassell's offers a run of recipes for turning the boiled feet into something worth eating at table: fried, in a fricassee, and curried. The curry itself is thoroughly anglicised, with sour apple and onion cooked to a purée and a spoonful of shop-bought curry paste, a formula that had settled into British domestic cookery by the middle of the century and persisted well into the twentieth. Commercial curry powder was advertised in Britain from the 1780s, with bottled pastes a nineteenth-century product, and their use let a cook flavour cheap, gelatinous, otherwise bland cuts without keeping a spice cupboard.