Home › The Principles of Cookery › Trotters, Sheep's, Fried
Trotters, Sheep's, Fried
Stuff and stew the trotters as above. Make a frying-batter as follows. Mix a pinch of salt with five ounces of flour, and mix smoothly with this a quarter of a pint of water. Beat the yolks of two eggs with two table-spoonfuls of olive oil or oiled butter and add this mixture to the batter. Put it in a cool place for an hour or two, and a few minutes before it is wanted stir in the well-whisked whites of the eggs. Dip the trotters into the batter, and then fry in plenty of hot fat till they are lightly browned. Serve on a hot dish, and send tomato or Robert sauce to table with them. Time to fry, a few minutes.
This is the second half of a two-stage dish: the trotters must already be stuffed and stewed until tender before any batter touches them. Treat the frying as a finishing step of a few minutes, not a cooking method.
- "As above" means fully cooked firstSheep's trotters are almost all skin, tendon and gelatine, and need long, gentle simmering, commonly several hours, before they are edible. The frying here only sets the batter and browns the outside; nothing is being cooked through.
- SourcingSheep's or lamb's trotters are a butcher order in most places now, and arrive needing scalding, scraping and singeing unless the butcher has done it. Pigs' trotters, far easier to buy, behave the same way in this batter.
- Imperial measuresA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. Five ounces of flour is a weight, roughly 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour spooned and levelled; weigh it if you can, since the batter should be thick enough to cling.
- Oiled butterIn period usage this means butter melted until it runs clear as oil, the milky sediment often being left behind or poured off, which comes close to clarified butter. Plain melted butter will work but the solids brown quickly in the fryer.
- Why the batter restsThe hour or two in a cool place lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, giving a batter that coats evenly instead of shrinking off. The whisked whites go in at the last moment for lift; folded in early they collapse.
- Frying temperatureThe recipe gives none; "plenty of hot fat" means deep fat, for which 350-375F is the modern equivalent. Below that the batter absorbs grease before it sets; the trotters are sticky with gelatine, so pat them dry before dipping or the coating will slide.
- Robert sauceSauce Robert is a brown sauce finished with softened onion, white wine or vinegar and mustard - sharp, to cut the richness. Any well-made mustardy brown sauce or a plain tomato sauce serves the same purpose.
Trotters belong to the frugal end of Victorian and Edwardian cookery, where a carcass was worked through to the last joint and gelatinous cuts were prized rather than tolerated. Cassell's gives them in several guises - boiled, stewed, in a broth, and here egg-battered and deep-fried. Sheep's trotters were also sold ready cooked by street vendors and cookshops in British towns. The batter itself is a French-style pâte à frire, enriched with oil and lightened with beaten whites, of the kind English cookery writers had absorbed from professional kitchens through the nineteenth century; the accompanying sauce Robert is older still, named in French cookery texts long before this book and often traced, traditionally rather than on firm evidence, to a cook or victualler called Robert. The dish shows the period's habit of dressing cheap material in expensive technique.