Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pig's Pettitoes, or Sucking Pig's Feet, Fried in Batter
Pig's Pettitoes, or Sucking Pig's Feet, Fried in Batter
Make a frying batter as follows. Mix five ounces of flour smoothly with a gill of water and a little salt. Add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, mixed with two table-spoonfuls of Lucca oil; beat the batter for five or six minutes, then put it aside for an hour. It ought to be as thick as custard. A few minutes before it is wanted, stir in the whites of the eggs, whisked to a firm froth. Clean the pettitoes thoroughly. Boil them gently in as much broth or water as will cover them, until they are tender. Take them up, dry them well, split them open, dip them into the batter, and fry them in hot butter until they are lightly browned. Serve on a neatly-folded napkin. Time to boil the pettitoes, from twenty to thirty minutes; to fry, ten minutes. Probable cost, uncertain, pig's pettitoes being generally sold with the pig. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A straightforward fritto of boiled trotters in a rested egg batter. The only real trap is the boiling time, which suits genuine suckling-pig feet and nothing else.
- Boiling timeTwenty to thirty minutes applies to the tiny feet of a suckling pig. Ordinary butcher's pig's trotters need 2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering, or about 40 minutes at pressure, before the skin and connective tissue turn tender enough to eat.
- PettitoesAn old term for pig's feet, sometimes extended to the feet plus the heart, liver and lights. Here it means the feet only. Suckling pig's trotters are a special order; standard trotters are cheap and widely stocked, often split lengthwise already.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, about 142 ml (the US gill is smaller, 4 fl oz). With 5 oz (roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons) of flour and two yolks, this gives the custard-thick batter the recipe describes.
- Lucca oilVictorian shorthand for the fine olive oil exported from Lucca in Tuscany. Any decent olive oil stands in; it is there for tenderness in the batter, not flavour.
- Resting and the whitesThe hour's rest lets the flour hydrate so the coating fries crisp rather than pasty. Fold the whisked whites in at the last moment and use the batter at once, or the lift collapses.
- Frying in butterWhole butter browns and burns well below the temperature needed here. Use clarified butter or ghee, or a neutral oil at 350-360F, and give the coating room in the pan.
- Dry them properlyBoiled trotters come out gelatinous and slippery. Cool them, blot them dry, and the batter will cling; wet skin sheds the coating in the fat.
- ServingThe folded napkin was standard staging for anything fried, meant to absorb grease at table. A rack or paper does the job now. Two or three portions, as stated, with mustard or a sharp sauce.
Pettitoes were part of the old household economy of the whole pig: the cheeks, ears, tail and feet were the bits that came home with the carcass rather than being priced separately, which is why Cassell's can only report the cost as "uncertain, pig's pettitoes being generally sold with the pig." Feet are almost entirely skin, bone and collagen, so they reward long moist cooking and then something crisp to finish, which is what the coating of raised egg batter provides here. The word itself is old, appearing in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and is generally traced to a borrowing from French petite oie, the giblets and trimmings of a goose, which drifted in English to mean small feet of any kind. The specification of Lucca oil is a period marker: before the trade in bulk olive oil, Lucca was the name an English cook knew and a grocer stocked.