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Trotters, Sheep's
Take six or eight sheep's feet. Remove the wool, and singe them, then throw them into fast-boiling water, let them boil quickly for five minutes, drain them, and let them cool. Take the foot firmly in the left hand, give the bone a jerk with the right hand, and draw it out. Cut the hoof from the end of the foot, and put the feet into cold water. Let them boil, then simmer them as gently as possible until they are quite tender. Fill them with good veal forcemeat, and bind the feet with packthread to keep them in shape. Put them into a stewpan with as much of the liquor in which they were boiled as will cover them, an onion, and a bunch of sweet herbs. Boil them gently for half an hour, lift them out, and lay them on a dish. Strain the sauce, boil it down to glaze, and brush this over the feet. The trotters may be accompanied by tomato sauce, Robert sauce, or piquant sauce, and any stewed vegetables, or they may be eaten cold with oil and vinegar. Time to boil the trotters, three or four hours. Sufficient, three or four for a small dish. (See also MUTTON TROTTERS.)
A long, patient braise that turns almost pure collagen into something rich enough to glaze itself. Nearly everything the recipe asks of you at the start — wool, singeing, hooves — has already been done by the time trotters reach a modern counter.
- Buying themSheep's or lamb's trotters from a halal butcher or a good independent butcher come scalded, dehaired and with the hoof removed. Ask for them split or whole; whole is what this recipe wants. Order ahead, as few shops keep them out on display.
- Skip the wool and singeingThe first three lines describe cleaning a foot straight off the carcass. If yours are dressed, go directly to the five-minute blanch, which is still worth doing to firm the flesh and rinse away scum.
- BoningThe jerk-and-draw method works only after blanching and cooling; the bones also loosen further during the long simmer, so boning later is possible. The recipe's order is traditional rather than obligatory.
- The hinge: gentle heat"Simmer as gently as possible" is the whole dish. At a rolling boil the skin bursts, the gelatin clouds the liquor, and the feet break up rather than coming tender. Hold the pot at a bare shiver for the full three to four hours; a very low oven can help steady the heat, though the recipe keeps it on the stove.
- Veal forcemeatA period forcemeat is minced veal with suet or fat pork, breadcrumbs soaked in stock, egg to bind, and lemon zest, nutmeg, parsley and mace. Modern minced veal is lean; add about a quarter its weight in pork fat or fatty pork mince or the stuffing will be dry.
- PackthreadOrdinary kitchen twine. Tie each stuffed foot in two places, and remember to remove the string before glazing.
- Boiling down to glazeTrotter liquor reduces to a strong, sticky glace with no added gelatin. Strain through a fine sieve or cloth, skim the fat, then reduce hard until it coats a spoon; season only at that point, since the salt concentrates as the volume drops.
- The saucesSauce Robert is a brown onion sauce sharpened with mustard and vinegar; "piquant" is the same family with chopped gherkins and capers. Both cut the richness, which is the point — a plain trotter is heavy going.
- Yield and the cold versionThe recipe reckons three or four feet make "a small dish", i.e. a side dish rather than a main, without saying how many it feeds. Left to cool, the liquor sets to a firm jelly, which is what makes the cold-with-oil-and-vinegar serving work; chill them fully before slicing.
Trotters were one of the great economies of the Victorian kitchen: sold cheaply by the butcher, sometimes hawked already boiled in the street, and prized because their gelatin gave body to stocks and jellies before cheap commercial gelatine was commonplace. The book treats sheep's feet as a matter of course and cross-references mutton trotters. The stuffing with veal forcemeat, the reduction to a glaze and the accompaniment of sauce Robert show the dish being handled in the French manner — the same techniques applied to pieds de mouton in professional kitchens across the Channel, borrowed here to dignify an offcut. That double life is typical of the period: the identical ingredient turns up boiled plain in a working-class supper and boned, farced and glazed on a dinner-table side dish. The taste for them faded in Britain over the twentieth century as offal fell out of favour, but trotters never left the kitchens of the Middle East, the Balkans and South and East Asia, which is why the butchers who stock them today are usually the ones serving those communities.