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Sheep's Trotters, with Cucumber
Take two sets of sheep's trotters, and boil them till tender. Let them get cold, and divide each one into three pieces. Boil them again to make them hot. Peel one large or two small cucumbers, which cut into dice, and put these into a basin with a table-spoonful of salt and two table-spoonfuls of vinegar. Let the cucumber lie for an hour, drain it, and put into a saucepan with two ounces of fresh butter, a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar, a bunch of parsley, two or three young onions, a pinch of grated nutmeg, a pinch of cayenne, and, if liked, a piece of garlic the size of a pea. Simmer these ingredients very gently for about half an hour. Pour off the butter, and in its place put a spoonful or two of white sauce, or, failing this, of broth thickened with flour. Simmer a few minutes longer, add the yolks of three eggs beaten up with a quarter of a pint of milk or cream, and stir the sauce till it thickens, but on no account allow it to boil. Add a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, put the trotters on a dish, pour the sauce over, and serve. Time to make the sauce, one hour. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian offal dish built on a classic egg-and-cream liaison, with cucumber treated as a cooked vegetable rather than a salad. Two things decide whether it works: fully tender trotters and a sauce that never boils.
- The hinge: do not boil the sauceOnce the three yolks beaten with cream go in, hold the pan below a simmer — roughly 165–175F/75–80C is the working window — and stir constantly until it coats the spoon. A single boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into curds that will not come back.
- How many trottersA "set" means the four feet of one animal, so two sets is eight trotters. Cut into three pieces each, that is twenty-four pieces for three or four people. Sheep's or lamb's feet are a butcher or halal-market order now, not a supermarket item; ask for them scalded and cleaned.
- Boil them till tender means hoursThe recipe times only the sauce ("one hour") and gives no boiling time for the feet. Lamb's trotters need 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer before the skin and gelatinous tissue yield; a pressure cooker does it in about 45 minutes. Undercooked trotters are rubbery and no sauce will rescue them.
- Why cool them before cuttingThe chilled, set gelatine makes the feet firm enough to divide cleanly into three. Cut them hot and they tear. The second brief boil is only to reheat, three or four minutes.
- Salting the cucumberA tablespoon of salt to one large cucumber is a purging salt, not seasoning — it draws out water so the dice hold shape. Drain well and blot; do not rinse away all of it, and season the finished sauce lightly at the end.
- Parsley and onions come outThe "bunch of parsley" is a tied bundle and the young onions (spring onions) are aromatics. Both should be lifted out before the yolks go in, along with the garlic if you used it.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (55g); a quarter of a pint here is the imperial measure, 5 fl oz or about 150ml. A "spoonful or two" of white sauce means roughly 2 to 4 tablespoons of béchamel — enough to give the sauce body before the yolks thicken it.
- Pouring off the butterTilt the pan and spoon the butter away rather than draining through anything; the cucumber is soft by now and will break up. A little butter left behind does no harm.
- ServingServe immediately on a warmed dish. The sauce will not hold, and the gelatine in the trotters sets quickly as they cool, so this is not a dish to keep back.
Sheep's trotters belong to the thrifty end of Victorian cookery, where every part of a carcass had a use and feet — almost pure skin, bone and gelatine — were cheap enough to be sold by street hawkers as well as butchers. Boiled trotters were common cheap food in nineteenth-century British towns, and the gelatine they yielded was one household source of stock jelly alongside the commercial sheet gelatines then coming into use. What lifts this version out of the plain-boiled category is the sauce: butter, sugar, nutmeg, cayenne and lemon, finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison, which is the French sauce poulette treatment traditionally given to lamb's feet and tripe. The cooked cucumber is worth noting too — Victorian cooks stewed and stuffed cucumbers, a habit that has largely disappeared from English kitchens since.