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Cow-Heel, Fried, with Onions
Boil a cow-heel as in the last recipe; take it up, remove the bones, and put the meat away to get cold; then cut it into nice pieces, about a quarter of an inch in thickness and one inch and a half square. Cut about the same number of slices of Spanish onion, fry these and keep them hot. Dip the slices of heel in frying batter, and fry them in plenty of boiling fat till brightly browned. Serve very hot. The onions must be turned about until they are sufficiently cooked. They will require a few minutes more than the meat. Time: three hours to boil the heel; about twenty minutes to fry it and the onions. Probable cost of cowheel, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A frugal offal dish that depends entirely on the long first boil: cow-heel is almost pure collagen and connective tissue, and until that has broken down to gelatine the meat is inedibly tough. Everything after that is straightforward frying.
- The hinge: boil it properlyThree hours at a bare simmer is the minimum; a large heel may want four. The meat should slip from the bone without resistance. Under-boiled cow-heel will not improve in the fryer.
- Chilling is not optionalThe instruction to "put the meat away to get cold" is what makes the pieces cuttable. Warm cow-heel is slippery and gelatinous; refrigerate it several hours or overnight and it sets firm enough to cut into neat squares.
- SourcingCow-heel is the lower foot of cattle, sold split. Ask a halal, Caribbean or West African butcher, or look for "cow foot" or "beef foot" frozen. It is rarely on supermarket shelves now, though it is still cheap.
- "The last recipe"The preceding entry is simply boiled cow-heel, simmered until tender. Any well-flavoured aromatic broth will do.
- Frying batterA frying batter of this period is broadly flour, a little salt, an egg and enough milk or water to make a coating consistency, about the thickness of pouring cream.
- "Boiling fat"This means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the batter hits it, roughly 350-375F. The meat is already cooked, so you are only setting the batter and browning it: two to three minutes.
- The onionsSpanish onion sliced and fried slowly in a separate pan, turned often, until soft and brown at the edges. Start them well before the meat; ten to fifteen minutes is realistic, not the few extra minutes implied.
- YieldTwo or three as written, as a supper dish. One heel yields surprisingly little meat for its bulk, so allow one heel per two people if serving it as a main course.
Cow-heel belongs to the tradition of using every part of the beast, and in Victorian Britain it was one of the cheapest animal foods available — Cassell's puts it at fourpence to eightpence apiece. Its value was as much medicinal as culinary: the gelatine it yields made cow-heel broth and cow-heel jelly standard invalid food, prescribed for convalescents throughout the nineteenth century, and boiled heels also supplied the neutral gelatine base for savoury moulds and aspics before packaged gelatine was widely sold. Frying the leftover meat in batter, as here, is the second act of a thrifty kitchen: the broth had already been taken for the sick or for the stockpot, and what remained on the bone was too good to waste. The dish has largely left British cooking but survives robustly elsewhere — cow foot appears in Jamaican stews, Nigerian pepper soup, and Lancashire's own long-lived tripe-and-cow-heel trade, which kept specialist shops going into the twentieth century.