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Calf's Foot, Fried
A good dish may be made of two calf's feet which have been boiled for stock, and taken out while they are still firm. Remove the bones, and when the flesh is cold, cut it into small, nicely-shaped pieces, which must be placed for an hour in a pickle made with two table-spoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, one table-spoonful of oil, one bay-leaf, two pinches of salt, and one of pepper. Turn them two or three times. Take them out, drain them, dredge a little flour over them, and fry them in boiling butter or oil till they are lightly browned. Put them on a hot dish, and serve them with fried parsley. Probable cost, 4d., without the calf's feet. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A thrifty second use for the feet already simmered for stock — essentially a gelatinous fritter with a quick vinegar marinade. Nothing here is difficult, but two or three terms need translating.
- "Pickle" means marinadeThe tarragon vinegar, oil, bay and seasoning are a short marinade, not a preserving brine. An hour at room temperature is what is meant; the refrigerator is fine but the meat will firm up, so let it sit out briefly before flouring.
- Take the feet out earlyThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction to lift the feet from the stockpot while still firm. Cooked to collapse, the flesh will not hold a shape and cannot be cut into neat pieces; pull them once the bones slip out but the meat still resists a finger.
- Chill before cutting"When the flesh is cold" matters: calf's foot is very rich in collagen and sets firm as it cools. Press it between two plates in the refrigerator and it will slice cleanly.
- Sourcing the feetCalf's feet are no longer a supermarket item but most halal butchers and many old-style butchers will supply them, usually split and often frozen. Order ahead. Pig's trotters behave much the same way if calf is unavailable.
- Tarragon vinegarOnce a standard pantry bottle, now less common. White wine vinegar with a bruised sprig of tarragon steeped in it for an hour is an adequate stand-in.
- "Boiling butter"The phrase means butter hot enough to foam and sizzle briskly, the bubbling being its water content driving off. Clarified butter or oil is safer here, since the milk solids in whole butter will scorch before the pieces brown.
- Fried parsleyWhole sprigs, thoroughly dry, dropped into the same fat for 10 to 15 seconds until they stop spitting and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will erupt; drain it on paper first.
- Cost and yieldThe "probable cost, 4d." excludes the feet, which were assumed already paid for by the stock; it covers the marinade, flour and frying fat. Sufficient, the book says, for four or five persons.
Calf's foot earned its place in Victorian kitchens for its gelatine rather than its meat: it was the source of calf's-foot jelly, prescribed for invalids well into the twentieth century, and the thickening body in stocks and aspics before commercial powdered gelatine became cheap and reliable. What the recipe addresses is what to do with the carcass of an ingredient already used for something else, the logic that governed a household where nothing bought was thrown away. The vinegar-and-oil steep followed by flour and hot fat is a standard nineteenth-century treatment for cooked, bland, gelatinous meats, applied equally to tripe, cow-heel and leftover boiled beef; the acid cuts the sticky richness and the flour gives the crust something to hold. Cassell's ran through many editions from the 1870s onward, and its confidence that a reader could lay hands on two calf's feet says a good deal about how much closer the ordinary kitchen then stood to the whole animal.