Home › The Principles of Cookery › Calf's Foot, Roasted
Calf's Foot, Roasted
Boil two calf's feet for one hour and a half, then take them out of the saucepan, drain the water from them, tie them together, and fasten them on a spit. Baste freely with a little broth, which has not been cleared from fat, and when they have been before the fire about half an hour, dredge them with flour, baste with butter, and allow them to remain until they are nicely browned. When sufficiently cooked, place them on a hot dish, and pour round them a little brown sauce flavoured with port. Time, two hours and a half. Probable cost, calf's feet, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A spit-roasted variation on the boiled calf's foot, cheap Victorian offal turned into a dish for company. The method translates to a hot oven with little loss, but the ingredient itself now takes some hunting.
- Sourcing the feetCalf's feet are a special-order item from a butcher, halal or Latin American market, or an online supplier; they usually arrive split and scalded but may still need singeing and scrubbing. Two feet is the right quantity for three or four people as a small course, not a main plate — most of the weight is bone.
- PricesThe 4d. to 8d. each is late-Victorian British currency and is of no use as a guide; calf's feet are now a specialist purchase rather than the cheap standby they were.
- The initial boilAn hour and a half of simmering is what makes this work — the feet must be gelatinous and yielding before they ever meet the fire, since the roasting stage only browns and firms the surface. If they still resist a skewer at the joint, keep simmering.
- Spit to ovenLacking a spit and open fire, tie the feet, set them on a rack over a roasting tin and roast in a hot oven, or use a rotisserie attachment. The recipe's own total of two and a half hours leaves roughly an hour at the fire after the boil: half an hour before dredging, then the remainder to brown.
- Basting with unskimmed brothThe instruction to use broth "which has not been cleared from fat" is deliberate: the fat carries flavour onto the surface and helps the flour dredge crisp. Reserve some of the unskimmed cooking liquid from the boil rather than making anything separate.
- Dredging with flourFlour thrown onto a hot, fat-slicked surface and then basted with butter gives the crust — the same principle as a dredged roast joint. Dredge lightly and in two goes; a heavy coat will simply scorch.
- Brown sauce with port"Brown sauce" here means a meat-based espagnole or a reduced brown gravy, not the bottled condiment. A cup of good veal or beef stock reduced with a splash of port and mounted with butter does the job.
- Total timeThe two and a half hours quoted includes the boiling. Allow longer if the feet are large, and note that they can be boiled a day ahead and refrigerated — they will set solid and are easier to tie in that state.
Calf's feet were among the most useful cheap purchases in a nineteenth-century kitchen, valued less as meat than as a source of gelatine: boiled down they yielded the stock for calf's foot jelly, an invalid food and a set base for moulded sweets long before packaged gelatine was common. Cassell's gives a run of calf's foot entries — boiled, fried, hashed, jellied — and this roasted version is the one that treats the foot as something to be served whole and browned rather than rendered down. The two-stage method, a long boil followed by a spit before the fire, is often said to be typical of Victorian handling of tough or gelatinous cuts, and the flour dredge with butter is the same finishing trick applied to roast beef and mutton. That the book bothers to price the feet at pence apiece says a good deal about who was expected to cook from it.