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Pig's Feet and Ears, Fricasseed
Take the feet and ears of a pig, which, if not fresh, have been pickled with salt without any vinegar. Cleanse and wash them, then cut them into neat pieces, half an inch wide, and boil them in a pint of milk until they are quite tender. Drain and dry them well, and put them into a stewpan, with half a pint of veal stock, a little salt and cayenne, a blade of mace, a strip of lemon-rind, and a sliced onion. Simmer for a quarter of an hour, then add a piece of butter, the size of a walnut, rolled thickly in flour, and three table-spoonfuls of cream. Stir the liquid over a slow fire until it is smooth and thick, and serve the meat on a hot dish, with the sauce poured round it; garnish with sliced lemon. Pig's feet and ears should be gently boiled. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian fricassee of trotters and ears, relying on their gelatine to give the sauce body. The only real difficulty is that the original hides the longest step behind the phrase "until they are quite tender."
- Cooking timeTrotters and ears want long, bare simmering, often two to three hours when left in large pieces, though the half-inch pieces the original calls for will need appreciably less. "Quite tender" means the skin yields with no resistance and the cartilage in the ear has gone translucent; anything short of that is rubbery and unpleasant.
- Cut the meat after cooking, not beforeThe instruction to cut into half-inch pieces before boiling makes the pieces awkward to handle and lose their shape. Simmer the feet split lengthwise and the ears whole, then cut once cool enough to handle.
- "Pickled with salt without any vinegar"This means dry-salted or brined trotters, a common butcher's product then and still sold in some Caribbean, Chinese and Southern US markets. Soak salted feet overnight in cold water and change it once, or the finished sauce will be inedibly salty. Fresh trotters need no soaking.
- The milkA pint of milk (UK pint, 20 fl oz, so about 2½ US cups) is a blanching medium meant to whiten the meat and pull out strong flavours, not a sauce base. It will catch and scorch over direct heat, so keep the pan barely trembling and stir occasionally. The milk is discarded.
- Butter the size of a walnutConventionally reckoned at roughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Rolled "thickly in flour" it functions as a beurre manié: whisk it into the simmering stock in small pieces so it disperses without lumping.
- Mace and lemon-rindA blade of mace is one whole piece of the dried aril, worth seeking out; about ¼ teaspoon of ground mace is a rough stand-in but muddies the sauce. Fish out the mace, lemon strip and onion before the butter and cream go in.
- Veal stockHalf a pint (10 fl oz UK) of light veal stock. A mild unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, as the point of a fricassee is a pale sauce.
- Yield and servingThe book claims four or five, which assumes this is one dish among several. As a main course it serves two or three, and wants something sharp alongside — mustard, pickled vegetables or a vinegary salad — to cut the gelatine and cream.
Fricassee in nineteenth-century English usage meant meat cut up, cooked gently in a small quantity of liquid and finished with a pale sauce enriched with cream and thickened with flour — the opposite of a brown stew, and a technique borrowed wholesale from French practice. Feet and ears were cheap, widely available from pork butchers, and prized for exactly the quality that puts modern cooks off: the collagen that turns to gelatine and gives a sauce a glossy, slightly sticky body without any reduction. The note that the feet may have been "pickled with salt without any vinegar" reflects the standard preservation trade — souse and pickled trotters were staple cheap food — and a vinegar cure might well have fought the milk and cream here. Boiling meat in milk before saucing it is an old device for whitening and softening strong-tasting cuts, and it appears throughout English cookery of the period for tripe, calf's head and brains as well.