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Sheep's Trotters, Stuffed
Take some sheep's trotters, as in the recipe SHEEP'S TROTTERS A LA POULETTE, and stew them in the same manner, but do not let them be overdone, as they are to be stuffed with a forcemeat, which could not be done in the latter case. Introduce forcemeat for quenelles in the room of the bones. When the trotters are well stuffed, put them between layers of bacon, and moisten them with a poele (see POELE). Stew them for half an hour only, on account of the forcemeat. Drain them, and cover with a sauce well seasoned, either white or brown, according to taste. As they are to be served whole, when you bone them, mind you do not injure the skin, or they would not hold the forcemeat that you must put in. This dish is excellent, as well for the taste as for health. It is particularly good for weak stomachs. The sheep's trotters are very good likewise, when they have been done as above, fried in the following way. When they are cold, add some of the sauce to them all round; then dip them in crumbs of bread, and in a batter and crumbs again; fry them of a good colour, and serve with tomato sauce.
A boned-and-stuffed trotter is patient work rather than difficult work, and everything depends on keeping the skin whole. The recipe assumes you have already read the entries for sheep's trotters à la poulette, forcemeat for quenelles and poêle, so the useful part of the instruction is the sequence rather than the quantities.
- The hinge: bone them without tearingThe trotter is a bag that must hold forcemeat through half an hour of stewing. Work the bones out from the split side with your fingers and the point of a small knife, and if the skin does perforate, close it with a stitch of kitchen twine rather than trusting the sauce to hide it.
- Two cookings, deliberately underdone firstTrotters normally want three to four hours of gentle simmering to become tender. Here the first stew is stopped short of that so they still hold their shape for boning and filling, and the second stew of thirty minutes finishes both skin and stuffing. Do not shorten the first stage so much that the collagen has not begun to soften.
- SourcingSheep's or lamb's feet are a butcher's order now, not a supermarket item; ask for them scalded and the hair and hoof removed, which is what the Victorian cook assumed. Halal and Caribbean butchers are the most likely source. Allow two to three per person as a course.
- PoêlePo u00eale — a poêle here is a rich braising medium, not a frying pan: melted fat or butter with stock and aromatic vegetables and herbs, used to moisten white meats so they cook without colouring. Any well-flavoured light stock enriched with butter will stand in for it.
- Forcemeat for quenellesA pounded raw forcemeat of veal, chicken or fish with panada, egg and cream — in a modern kitchen, a food-processor mousseline, kept cold. It sets during the second stew, which is why the timing is fixed by the stuffing rather than by the feet.
- Layers of baconThe bacon is barding, laid under and over the trotters so they braise in fat and steam rather than drying at the surface. Use unsmoked streaky or fat back; modern smoked bacon will dominate a delicate white sauce.
- The fried variantThe fried variant — Chill the stewed trotters thoroughly before crumbing, or they will collapse in the fat. The sequence given is crumbs, then batter, then crumbs again, which builds a thick armoured coat; the book asks only that you 'fry them of a good colour', which in a modern kitchen means roughly 350–375F until deep gold. Served with tomato sauce.
- "Good for weak stomachs"This is the period's view of gelatinous meats as invalid food. It reflects nineteenth-century dietetics, not current nutritional advice, and is no reason to serve it to someone unwell.
Sheep's trotters belonged to the thrifty end of Victorian cookery and to the street trade as much as to the kitchen: boiled trotters were hawked in London alongside pea soup and pigs' feet, and Mayhew's mid-century surveys of street food record them among the cheap cooked meats. What Cassell's does here is haul the trotter upmarket by applying full French technique to it — boning, a quenelle forcemeat, barding with bacon, a poêle, a finishing sauce white or brown — the same treatment given to a stuffed lamb's ear or calf's ear in Carême's tradition, where the appeal lay in turning a nearly worthless scrap into something that took a professional considerable labour to construct. The claim that the dish suits weak stomachs is characteristic of the period, when gelatinous, long-simmered meats were routinely prescribed as restorative and invalid cookery could occupy its own chapter in a household dictionary.