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Cow-Heel, Fried
Prepare a cow-heel as before; simmer it gently for three hours, drain it, remove the bones, and cut it into convenient-sized pieces, about one inch and a half long. Mix some bread-crumbs with a little chopped parsley, salt, cayenne, and finely-shredded lemon-rind. Dip the pieces in beaten egg, then in the bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot butter or dripping till brightly browned. Put them on a hot dish, and pour over them some good melted butter flavoured with lemon-juice. Probable cost of cow-heel, 4d. to 8d. each. Sufficient, one heel for two or three persons.
A Victorian way of using the gelatinous foot of the ox: long-simmered, boned, crumbed and fried. Nothing here is difficult, but two phrases in the text mean something different now than they did in 1900.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn British cookery books of this period melted butter means a thin white sauce: butter and flour cooked together and let down with water or light stock, seasoned, then finished with lemon juice. Proportions vary from book to book. Plain liquid butter poured over crumbed fritters will simply soak them.
- "Prepare a cow-heel as before"The recipe refers back to an earlier entry not reproduced here. The usual preparation is: have the butcher split the foot, scrub it hard, scald and scrape away any hair or hoof debris, then soak it in cold water, changing the water. Blanching it from cold and rinsing before the long simmer gives a cleaner result.
- SourcingCow-heel is the foot of the ox, sold as ox foot or cow foot. Supermarkets will not carry it; halal, Caribbean, West African and traditional butchers usually will, often already split and cut into sections.
- Three hours is a minimumCow foot is nearly all connective tissue and needs to be genuinely fork-tender before boning. Reckon on 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, or about 50-60 minutes at pressure. Undercooked, the pieces are rubbery and impossible to bone cleanly.
- Chill before crumbingThe meat and skin are loaded with gelatin and are slippery and fragile while warm. Drain, bone, cut into the inch-and-a-half pieces, then refrigerate until firm. Cold pieces hold their shape and take egg and crumbs far better.
- Frying medium and heatDripping is beef fat rendered from roasting and is still sold in jars; lard or a neutral oil works the same way. Shallow-fry at 350-375F. Butter alone will brown the crumbs before the fat is hot enough, so use clarified butter if you want the flavour.
- Seasoning quantitiesThe recipe gives none. For one heel, roughly 4 oz dried breadcrumbs, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, the finely grated zest of a lemon, half a teaspoon of salt and a good pinch of cayenne is in proportion.
- Yield and costOne heel serves two or three as the book says, best as a first course or supper dish with the lemon sauce and something sharp alongside. The 4d. to 8d. price marks this as cheap offal cookery, not a delicacy.
Cow-heel belonged to the economical end of the Victorian butcher's stall, valued less for meat than for the gelatin it gave up: it went into calf's-foot-style jellies, into brawn, and into the stockpot to give body to soups and sauces. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, an enormous alphabetical compendium of the Victorian period, catalogues it the way it catalogues everything, with a plain simmering method followed by variations, and this fried version is the standard trick for making a soft, glutinous cut palatable to a middle-class table: bone it, egg and crumb it, and serve it with a sharp buttery sauce so the richness is cut. The same logic produced fried tripe, fried brains and crumbed sweetbreads. Cow foot never disappeared from cooking, it only moved: it remains a staple of Caribbean, West African, Filipino and Korean kitchens, where the gelatin the Victorians treated as a texture problem is the whole point of the dish.