Home › The Principles of Cookery › COW-HEEL (au naturel)
COW-HEEL (au naturel)
This dish, which is delicious as well as nourishing when properly cooked, may be served in several different ways. It should first of all be thoroughly scalded and cleansed, and the fat between the claws removed. This is often already done when the heel is bought at a tripe shop. (Ask for one which has been scalded, not boiled, or nearly all the nourishment will be gone from it.) Cut a cow-heel into four parts, and put them into a saucepan, cover them with cold water, and simmer them gently for four hours; take them up, remove the bones, thicken the gravy with a piece of butter rolled in flour, and put with it a table-spoonful of scalded and chopped parsley, and the juice of half a lemon. Season with salt and pepper, boil all together again for a few minutes, and serve hot. If there is more liquid than will be required for sauce, it should be preserved, and will be found excellent for sauces and soups. Probable cost of cow-heel, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient, one heel for a small family.
A gelatin-rich braise that needs almost nothing but time. The instructions hold up well; the difficulty today is sourcing rather than technique.
- Where to buyTripe shops are gone, but cow heel (also sold as cow foot or beef foot) is common in Caribbean, West African, Latin American and East Asian butchers, and any full-service butcher can order one. Ask for it split lengthwise, which saves you cutting through bone at home.
- "Scalded, not boiled"The point is that a foot already boiled at the shop has given up its gelatin into someone else's pot. If yours arrives raw and hairy, scald it, scrape it, and pull the waxy fat from between the claws before it goes in the pan.
- Four hours is not an exaggerationCollagen needs long, low heat to become gelatin. Keep the water at a bare tremble — a rolling boil clouds the liquid and shreds the meat. Six hours does no harm if the foot is large; it is done when the meat slips from the bone with no resistance.
- Skim and degreaseCow heel throws a great deal of fat and scum. Skim through the first half hour, and if you can, chill the strained liquid so the fat lifts off in a solid cap before you make the sauce.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: roughly equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded together, about 1 tbsp of each per cup of liquid. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then simmer two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour.
- Scalded parsleyPour boiling water over the chopped parsley and drain it. It sets the colour and takes the raw edge off — worth doing, and it takes seconds.
- Season lateLong simmering concentrates the liquid, so hold back the salt until the sauce is thickened. The recipe adds the lemon juice with the parsley and boils everything a few minutes more; keep that final boil brief, as hard boiling dulls the lemon.
- The leftover liquidThe reserved stock will set to a firm jelly in the refrigerator — that is the collagen, not a fault. Keep it up to three days chilled or freeze it in portions; a spoonful gives body to any pan sauce or soup.
- YieldOne heel gives roughly two to three modest servings of meat and sauce, notwithstanding the book's "small family." Serve it over boiled potatoes, rice or toast to catch the sauce.
Cow heel belongs to the economy of offal cookery that Cassell's readers took for granted: at fourpence to eightpence each, a foot was among the cheapest animal foods in a late-Victorian market, and it was valued precisely for the gelatin that made thin broth feel substantial. The same property put feet at the centre of Victorian invalid cookery — calf's-foot jelly was the standard convalescent food of the century, and the "nourishment" the writer worries about losing to a pre-boiled heel is that gelatin. The dish never disappeared so much as it migrated: cow foot remains a staple in Jamaican, Trinidadian, Nigerian and Filipino kitchens, and in Britain it survived longest in the industrial north and the Midlands, where tripe dressers sold heels, elder and cowheel stew well into the twentieth century. The label au naturel here simply marks this as the plainest of the several ways the book says the dish may be served.