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MUTTON TROTTERS (another way)
These require long and slow stewing, either in water with vegetables, carrot, onion, celery, a few cloves, and peppercorns, or with white sauce; they are sometimes boned, and stuffed with forcemeat, the trotters being first boiled long enough to slip their bones easily without injury to the skin. Lay them so stuffed into a stewpan with a little of their own liquor from the boiling; when they have been stewed thus for half an hour, take out the trotters and reduce the gravy to a glaze, with which cover them, and serve. Before cooking, cut off the hoof, singe, wash, and blanch, for five minutes, in boiling water. Time to stew, three hours and a half.
A Victorian way with sheep's feet: blanched, stewed to collagen collapse, then boned, stuffed and glazed. Nothing here is difficult, but everything depends on the trotters holding their shape while the connective tissue gives way.
- SourcingMutton trotters are sheep's feet, sold by halal and Caribbean butchers and some Greek and Turkish shops, usually already scalded and split. Ask for them cleaned; if they arrive with hoof and hair intact you will need to do the singeing and hoof removal the recipe describes.
- Singe and blanchSingeing over a gas flame burns off remaining wool stubble, which otherwise gives the broth a distinct sheepy funk. The five-minute blanch in boiling water is for scum, not cooking: discard that water, rinse the trotters, then start the stew with fresh liquid.
- The hinge: keep the skin wholeThe whole point of the first boiling is to loosen the bones without splitting the skin, since the skin is the wrapper for the forcemeat. That means a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, and lifting them out with a spider rather than tongs.
- Three and a half hours means itTrotters are largely collagen and bone. The book's three and a half hours at a slow simmer is there for a reason: shorter cooking tends to leave the skin rubbery and the bones unwilling to slip, so this is not an old timing to shorten.
- Aromatics and "white sauce"The vegetable option is simply an aromatic stewing broth: carrot, onion, celery, the 'few cloves' and a scatter of peppercorns the recipe asks for, in whatever quantity you judge right. The "white sauce" alternative means a flour-and-butter white sauce, or a velouté made from the trotter liquor, thinned enough to stew in without catching.
- ForcemeatVictorian forcemeat was typically minced veal or pork with breadcrumbs, suet, herbs and egg to bind; no recipe is given here. Sausage meat with parsley, lemon zest and a little grated nutmeg does the same job. Stuff loosely; it swells.
- Reducing to a glazeThe strained liquor sets hard because of the gelatine, so reduce it uncovered at a lively boil until it coats a spoon and taste as you go — salt concentrates fast, and a glaze reduced too far turns bitter and sticky.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Sheep's trotters are small, so allow two or three a head depending on whether they open the meal or are the meal. Serve hot; once the glaze chills it sets to jelly, which is pleasant in its own right but not what the recipe intends.
Trotters occupied an honourable place in nineteenth-century British cookery for the plain reason that gelatine was worth money: feet, ears and knuckles were the household's source of the body that set jellies, thickened sauces and made a glaze shine without any commercial product. Sheep's feet were smaller than pig's, and boning-and-stuffing them was a way of dressing offal up for the table — the same logic that produced stuffed sheep's hearts and boned pig's head. The instruction reads less as a set-piece dish than as a demonstration that long slow stewing converts tough collagen into something rich, and that the resulting liquor is itself an ingredient. Mutton, meaning sheep over roughly one to two years old, was the ordinary British eating sheep well into the twentieth century before the trade shifted almost entirely to young lamb, which is part of why these cuts have quietly disappeared from mainstream British butchery while remaining everyday food elsewhere.