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Calf's Foot Soup
Cut two calf's feet into about twelve pieces, and put them into a saucepan, with half a head of celery, a bunch of parsley, a small sprig of thyme, an onion with five or six cloves stuck into it, and two quarts of nicely-flavoured stock. Simmer all gently together, skimming the liquid carefully, for two hours. Take out the feet, strain the liquor, return it to the saucepan, and thicken it with two dessert-spoonfuls of finelysifted rice flour. A few minutes before the soup is wanted, add pepper and salt, and stir gradually into it a cupful of milk or cream, mixed with the yolks of two eggs and a glass of white wine. Stir it over the fire for two or three minutes, but on no account allow it to boil. Serve, with the pieces of calf's feet, in the tureen. Probable cost, 7d. per pint, if made with milk, and exclusive of the wine. Sufficient for three pints of soup.
A Victorian gelatin-rich soup finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Two details govern the result: the long, gentle simmer that draws body out of the feet, and the final thickening, which must never boil.
- The liaison is the hingeEgg yolks beaten with milk or cream will curdle into threads the moment the soup reaches a boil. Temper the mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, stir it back in off the heat, then hold the pan at a bare 170-180F for two or three minutes until it coats the spoon.
- Sourcing calf's feetNot a supermarket item, but butchers who serve Caribbean, Latin American or Eastern European customers usually carry them, often split and frozen. Ask for them cut across the bone into pieces, as the recipe assumes; a hacksaw is otherwise required. Scald and scrub them before they go in the pot.
- Two hours is optimisticAt two hours the collagen is likely only partly rendered and the meat still firm. Three to four hours at a slow simmer gives tender meat and a broth that sets to a wobble when cold, which is the point of using feet at all.
- Dessert-spoonfulRoughly two teaspoons, so the two spoonfuls of rice flour amount to about four teaspoons for two quarts of stock. That is a light thickening only; the feet themselves supply most of the body.
- Rice flourFinely-sifted rice flour is still sold. Slake it in a little cold stock before adding, or it will lump.
- A glass of wineIn Victorian cookery writing this generally means a wine-glass, about 2 fl oz or a quarter cup. Add it with the liaison, not earlier, or the flavour cooks away.
- SkimmingFeet throw a great deal of grey scum in the first half hour. Skim persistently at the start and the finished soup will be clear under its liaison; neglect it and no straining will fix the muddiness.
- The pieces in the tureenThe recipe directs the pieces of foot to be served in the tureen. You may prefer to pull the meat and skin off, dice it, and return that to the tureen, discarding the bones.
- YieldThree pints. Reheat leftovers gently; once the yolks are in, a boil will still ruin it.
Calf's feet were a staple of the nineteenth-century kitchen for one reason: they were the household's source of gelatin. Before packaged leaf and powdered gelatin became cheap and ubiquitous in the later Victorian decades, anything that had to set -- jellies, aspics, blancmanges -- began with feet boiled down for hours, and calf's foot jelly was the standard invalid food, pressed on convalescents in novels as often as in cookbooks. A soup made the same way, then enriched with egg yolks, cream and white wine, sits in the older tradition of restorative broths meant to be nourishing as much as delicious. The price note is characteristic of Cassell's, which costed nearly every dish by the pint or the pound so that a mistress could judge whether it belonged on her table; sevenpence a pint placed this among the more comfortable middle-class soups rather than an everyday one.