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LAMB'S FEET (another way)
Prepare and stew the feet as in the last recipe. When quite tender, remove the bones, roll the feet, dip them in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them. Or, if preferred, spread a mixture prepared as follows over a dish, let it get quite hot in the oven, then place the rolled feet upon it, and serve them dry. In either case, sauce (Robert or supreme sauce) should be sent to table in a tureen. For the mixture, take four table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, season them with pepper and salt, rub into them a piece of butter the size of a large egg, and mix with them, first, a table-spoonful of grated cheese, and afterwards the yolks of three eggs well beaten. Time, three hours to stew the feet, ten minutes to fry them.
A boned, crumbed and fried trotter dish of the sort that assumes you already have the previous page in front of you. The two things worth knowing before starting are how to source the feet and how long they really need in the pot.
- Sourcing and cleaningLamb's feet are usually a special order: a halal butcher, a Caribbean or Greek butcher, or a good traditional butcher is the likeliest source, and supermarkets rarely carry them. They should arrive scalded and scraped, but check between the cleats for bristle and singe or scrape any that remains before cooking.
- "As in the last recipe"The preceding recipe is not reproduced on this page. A common nineteenth-century treatment for feet was to blanch them in boiling water, refresh, then simmer in a light stock or a blanc (water slaked with a spoonful of flour and a little lemon juice) with an onion, a carrot and a bouquet, kept at a bare tremble so the skin does not shred.
- Three hours is honestUnlike many Victorian timings, this one is not exaggerated. Trotters are almost entirely skin, tendon and collagen, and they need two and a half to three hours at a slow simmer before the bones will pull clean. A pressure cooker will do it in about 45 minutes at high pressure.
- Boning and rollingBone them while still hot; once the gelatine sets the flesh clings to the bone. Roll each one tightly, wrap in cling film or muslin and chill for at least two hours so the natural gelatine firms the roll enough to survive crumbing and frying.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz (55 g). The mixture is four tablespoons of fine dry crumbs, that butter, a tablespoon of grated hard cheese and three egg yolks -- a thick paste rather than a sauce.
- Heating the crumb bedThe book gives neither temperature nor time, only "let it get quite hot in the oven". A moderate oven, long enough for the yolk-bound paste to set rather than merely warm, is the sense of it. It is a crumb-and-yolk paste, not a sauce.
- Frying already-cooked feetThe recipe allows ten minutes but does not say whether the frying is deep or shallow. In oil at 350-360F the crumbed rolls need three to four minutes, turning, to colour and heat through -- the meat is cooked already, and longer only splits the coating.
- The saucesSauce Robert is a brown onion sauce with white wine and vinegar, sharpened with mustard stirred in off the heat so it does not turn bitter; sauce supreme is a chicken velouté. Either cuts the richness of a gelatinous fried trotter, which is the point of sending it separately in a tureen.
Trotters were among the cheaper things on the butcher's slab and laborious to prepare, which may be part of why they appear so often in nineteenth-century cookery books and so rarely now. The technique here -- long stewing, boning, crumbing and frying, with a sharp sauce sent separately -- is the classical French treatment generally traced to the Sainte-Menehould style applied to pig's trotters, adapted in English kitchens to the smaller and more delicate lamb's foot. Cassell's places it among a run of variations, each building on the last, on the assumption that a cook working through the section would know the base method by heart. The crumb-and-yolk bed sets into a savoury custard under the rolls, and the recipe leaves the cook a choice between Robert and suprême -- brown and mustardy, or pale and creamy.