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Calf's Foot Stewed with Herbs
Wash a calf's foot. When it is thoroughly clean, boil it in a quart of water until the flesh can be easily taken from the bone. Remove the bones, and cut the flesh into small, evenly-shaped pieces. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a stewpan, let it melt, then put into it the pieces of meat, having previously salted, peppered, and rolled them in flour. Let them remain in the boiling butter until they are nicely browned; put with them two small onions, a dozen mushrooms chopped finely, and a bunch of savoury herbs; mix the stock in by degrees, and let them simmer gently for half an hour or so; then add the juice of a lemon, and three well-beaten eggs. Do not allow the liquid to boil again after the eggs have been added. If the sauce is not sufficiently thick, a little more flour may be mixed in before the eggs and vinegar. If any of the liquor in which the meat was boiled is not required for the sauce, it will be found very useful for gravies, etc.
A gelatinous braise finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison, in the manner of a blanquette. The whole dish turns on the last step.
- Never let the eggs boilThe three beaten eggs are a liaison, not a binder to be cooked out. Take the pan off the heat, temper a ladle of the hot sauce into the eggs, then stir them back in and hold the sauce below a simmer — around 160-170F. A single bubble curdles it into scrambled egg in gravy.
- Buying the footCalf's feet are still sold by halal and Caribbean butchers and by anyone who breaks down whole veal, usually split lengthwise and sometimes frozen. Order ahead. One foot yields surprisingly little meat; two will feed four people, and the leftover liquor sets to a firm jelly in the fridge.
- "Until the flesh can be easily taken from the bone"The recipe gives no time; expect three to four hours at a bare simmer. A quart of water will not cover a whole foot in most modern pans — use enough to cover and top up as it reduces, then reserve the liquor, which is presumably the "stock" called for later.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or four tablespoons. Enough to brown the floured pieces properly in a wide pan without crowding them.
- A bunch of savoury herbsA Victorian bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied with string so it can be pulled out before the eggs go in. "Savoury" here is the general adjective, not the herb summer savory, though a sprig of it would not be wrong.
- The vinegar that is never listedThe final sentence mentions "before the eggs and vinegar," but no vinegar appears in the method — the acid in the recipe as given is lemon juice. Cassell's is inconsistent here; use the lemon, and add a teaspoon of white wine vinegar only if the finished sauce tastes flat.
- MushroomsA dozen small button mushrooms, perhaps 4 oz. Chop them fine as directed; they work as seasoning for the sauce rather than as a vegetable in their own right.
- Yield and servingOne foot serves two as a main course, three or four as a first course. Serve it hot in a shallow dish with rice, plain boiled potatoes or toast — the sauce is rich and sets on cooling, so it does not reheat gracefully.
Calf's foot was one of the great utility ingredients of the nineteenth-century kitchen, valued less for its meat than for the gelatine it gave up: the same foot that produced this stew also produced calf's-foot jelly, the standard invalid food of the Victorian sickroom, and the setting agent behind aspics and moulded creams before commercial leaf gelatine became cheap and reliable. The dish demonstrates two techniques at once — a long extraction boil, then a brown braise finished with a liaison of egg and acid, the method that also defines blanquette de veau and the Greek avgolemono. The frugality is characteristic of the book: the closing note about saving the cooking liquor for gravies is the sort of instruction aimed at cooks who bought a whole animal's worth of odd parts because they were cheap.