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Neat's Feet, with Parsley Sauce
A neat's foot or cow's heel, which is the same thing, is generally three-parts cooked when offered for sale. If it is wished to cook it separately, one or two recipes will be found elsewhere; but the substance of the feet consists of so little besides gelatine and bones that they are more valuable when stewed to enrich other dishes than when served by themselves. They are sometimes stewed with a very small quantity of water until the bone leaves the flesh, and then served with a little parsley and butter, flavoured with lemon-juice. Probable cost, 8d. each. Sufficient, one foot for two persons.
A sparse entry even by Cassell's standards: the dish is really cow's heel stewed in its own gelatine and dressed with parsley butter. The points below fill in what the original assumes every cook already knew.
- "Neat" means cattleA neat is an ox or cow, so a neat's foot is a beef foot, sold today as cow heel or beef foot and usually split lengthwise. Ask a halal or Caribbean butcher, or an old-fashioned counter that handles offal; supermarkets rarely stock it.
- "Three-parts cooked when offered for sale"Feet were commonly sold already scalded, scraped and largely boiled, which may be why the book gives no cooking time. Modern cow heel comes raw, so expect several hours at a bare simmer, or upwards of an hour at pressure, before the bone slips free of the flesh.
- Cleaning firstScrub the foot, check between the cleft of the hoof for grit and hair, then blanch it in boiling water for ten minutes and rinse before the long stew. Skipping this leaves a scummy, muttony-smelling liquor.
- "A very small quantity of water"Enough to come halfway up the pieces, no more, kept covered and barely bubbling. The point is a short, concentrated liquor that sets to jelly when cold; a full pot of water dilutes the gelatine the whole dish depends on.
- "Parsley and butter" is a sauceIn English cookery of this period the phrase means melted butter thickened slightly with flour, with chopped parsley stirred in at the end, not simply butter and herbs. Here you can build it on a few spoonfuls of the strained cooking liquor, which will give it body without cream. Add the lemon juice off the heat.
- Texture to aim forCow heel goes from tough to sticky and yielding, never to tender in the way a shin does. If it still resists at the bone, it needs more time, not more heat.
- Cost and yieldEightpence each puts it at the cheap end of the book's prices. One foot serves two, and the meat is scant, so serve it with plain boiled potatoes or a mound of buttered rice to carry the gelatinous liquor.
- The book's own adviceCassell's says outright that feet are better used to enrich other dishes than eaten alone. Two split feet added to a stew, a stock or an oxtail braise will give it the glossy, lip-sticking body no commercial stock cube reproduces.
Cow heel sat at the bottom end of the Victorian meat trade, alongside tripe, cheek and trotters, and was often said to arrive part-cooked from a tripe dresser rather than raw from a butcher, which is why the entry opens by noting how it comes to market. Its value was chiefly gelatine: the same feet were boiled down for calf's-foot and cow-heel jelly, given to invalids as a restorative, and rendered for neat's-foot oil, long used to dress leather and harness. Cassell's willingness to say plainly that the thing is better in the stockpot than on the plate marks it as a working reference book rather than a genteel one, and the dressing of parsley, butter and lemon is the standard English treatment applied to almost any boiled white meat or offal of the period. Cow heel never disappeared, only migrated; it is traditionally associated with Lancashire cookery and remains current in Caribbean, West African and South Asian kitchens, where the sticky liquor is the whole object.