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Calf's Foot Fritters
Prepare the calf's feet as in the last recipe, but, before they are fried, lay each piece in a light batter made thus. Pour a cupful of boiling water over a piece of butter about the size of a walnut, and when it is melted, add to it half a pint of cold water. Stir this gradually into four table-spoonfuls of fine flour, and mix with it the yolks of two eggs and a little salt and pepper. A few minutes before it is wanted, add the well-whisked whites of the eggs. Half fill a stewpan with frying fat, let this boil till it is still, then fry in it the pieces of meat covered with batter. Drain them from the fat, pile them on a hot dish, and serve them with pickled gherkins. Time to stand in the pickle, one hour; to fry, ten minutes. This quantity will suffice for four persons. Probable cost, 8d., without the calf's feet.
This is the second half of a two-part method: the feet are already boiled tender and marinated before they meet the batter. Everything here depends on the fat being hot enough that a wet batter sets on contact.
- "Boil till it is still"Frying fat does not boil; the phrase describes the moment the surface stops seething with escaping moisture and goes quiet, which is roughly 350-375F. A thermometer is more reliable than the sound.
- The preceding recipe"Prepare the calf's feet as in the last recipe" evidently involves boiling the feet tender, cutting them up, and steeping them in a pickle; the details are not repeated here. The one-hour standing time in the Time line refers to that pickle, not to anything done here.
- Frying timeTen minutes is far longer than needed. The meat is fully cooked already, so the fritters only need the two to four minutes it takes the batter to colour; beyond that the gelatinous meat slumps and the coating darkens.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is 10 fl oz in British measure; the cupful of boiling water is an unstandardised measure, somewhere between 8 fl oz and half a pint. Four tablespoonfuls of fine flour makes a very thin coating batter, an ounce or so; add flour cautiously if it will not cling.
- Butter the size of a walnutSomewhere between 1/2 oz and 1 oz; the equivalence was never fixed. The butter is melted in the boiling water before the cold water is added.
- The whisked whitesFolding them in at the last minute is the hinge of the recipe. Mix them in early and the air collapses; the batter then sits heavy on the meat instead of puffing away from it.
- Calf's feetNot a supermarket item. A butcher who handles whole veal will split and supply them, usually to order. They come raw, so allow time for the long preliminary boiling.
- Yield and servingFour servings as a savoury course, piled on a hot dish with pickled gherkins to cut the richness. The cost of eightpence covers batter, fat and pickles only.
Calf's foot earned its place in Victorian kitchens for its gelatine: it was the raw material of calf's-foot jelly, the standard invalid food of the century, and of the stock that set aspics and brawn. What was left after a plain boiling was too good to throw away, and cookery books answered with dishes like this one, in which the soft, sticky meat is pickled to sharpen it, coated and fried. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous late-nineteenth-century compendium arranged alphabetically and priced to the penny, is characteristic of the period in giving several consecutive recipes for the same cheap cut, each a variation on the one before, and in expecting a reader who would follow the chain from the previous entry without being told twice. The pairing with gherkins and a vinegar pickle is a common treatment for rich, gelatinous fried meat, from this to breaded pig's trotters.