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Sheep's Trotters
Sheep's trotters may generally be obtained at the tripe shops cleaned and partially boiled. When it is necessary to clean them at home, remove the wool from the hoofs, singe away the hairs, and put the trotters into boiling water for five minutes. Clean and scrape them well, and cut an inch off the end of the foot, including the hoofs, and carefully remove a dark curly-looking substance which grows between the divisions of the hoof. Sheep's trotters are usually sold in sets or "gangs"; they are whole-some and nourishing, and good jelly may be made from them. They should be kept soaking in cold water two or three hours before they are to be boiled. The liquor in which they are boiled will make excellent stock or jelly (see also MUTTON TROTTERS).
This is a preparatory method rather than a finished dish: it tells you how to get raw sheep's feet to the point where they can be boiled, stewed, fried in batter or set as jelly. Most of the work is cleaning, and one step in it is easy to skip.
- The step that mattersThe "dark curly-looking substance" between the cleaves is generally identified as the interdigital gland, a small waxy pouch in the sheep's foot. It is said to carry a strong smell that can taint the pot, and it is not something boiling deals with, so dig it out with the point of a knife -- the book has you do this after cutting an inch off the end of the foot.
- SourcingTripe shops are gone, but halal and Caribbean butchers, and some Greek and Turkish shops, sell sheep's or lamb's trotters, usually already scalded and scraped. Ask for them split if you want the marrow and gelatine to come out faster.
- A "gang"Older butchers' usage for a set, usually taken to be the four feet of one animal. The book does not say how many a gang contains.
- SingeingThe book does not say what to singe over. A gas burner or a cook's blowtorch does the same job in seconds; scrape the scorched stubble off under running water afterwards.
- No cooking time is givenCassell's leaves it to the cross-references. Trotters need roughly 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, longer if unsplit, until the skin slips and the bones pull free. A pressure cooker does it in about 50 minutes.
- The soakingTwo or three hours in several changes of cold water draws out blood and slackens the smell. Skip it and the first hour of cooking throws a great deal of grey scum you will have to skim.
- The jellyThe liquor sets on its own, being rich in collagen, so no added gelatine is needed. Chill it, lift off the fat cap, and clarify with beaten egg white and shell if you want it clear for aspic.
- YieldA gang of trotters gives a modest amount of picked meat and skin along with the setting liquor; how much depends on the size of the feet.
Sheep's trotters belonged to the cheap-offal end of Victorian eating, sold from tripe shops alongside cowheel, chitterlings and elder, and often bought ready-scalded because the cleaning was filthy work no one wanted to do at home. The entry treats the trotter as raw material as much as dinner: before commercial powdered gelatine was cheap and reliable, feet and cowheels were how a household got the setting power for jellies, aspics, brawn and moulded creams, and the note that "good jelly may be made from them" is the practical point of the entry. The same collagen accounts for their long afterlife in dishes that survive today -- Lancashire cowheel pies, Italian zampone (a stuffed pig's trotter associated with Modena) and piedini, Mexican manitas, and the trotters still stewed and fried across the eastern Mediterranean and South Asia.