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Cow Heel Fried
Buy the feet prepared at the butchers; boil well done. Season with salt and pepper.
Have ready an egg batter; fry brown, and serve hot. A nice breakfast dish.--Mrs. R. L. O.
A short recipe that assumes the butcher has done the hard part. Cow heel is the lower foot of a steer, mostly skin, tendon and collagen; it needs long wet cooking before it will take a batter and fry.
- "Prepared at the butchers""Prepared at the butchers" most likely means scalded, scraped clean of hair, and split lengthwise into halves or quarters. Feet sold today are usually already split; if not, ask for them cut, since a whole heel is very hard to break down at home.
- SourcingSupermarket meat counters rarely stock them. Halal, Caribbean, Latin American and Asian markets sell cow foot regularly, often frozen and sawn into rounds.
- "Boil well done" means hoursThis is the hinge of the dish. Collagen does not soften until roughly 3 to 4 hours at a bare simmer, longer if the pieces are large. The meat should slip from the bone and the surrounding tissue should be soft and translucent, not rubbery. A pressure cooker does the same job in about 45 minutes to an hour.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard rolling boil turns the pot cloudy and shreds the softened tissue. Keep it at a lazy bubble and skim the scum in the first twenty minutes.
- Cool before batteringThe recipe omits this. Drain the pieces, pull out the bones, and let the meat firm up on a plate; warm cow heel is slippery and sticky and will not hold batter. Chilled pieces cut cleanly and fry much better.
- Egg batterGenerally beaten egg thinned with a little milk and seasoned, with the pieces dipped in flour first so the egg has something to cling to; the recipe itself does not spell it out. Roughly two eggs to a couple of tablespoons of milk will coat about a pound of meat.
- FryingShallow-fry in about half an inch of fat at 350-365F, a few minutes a side until the coating sets and colours. The meat is already fully cooked; you are only crisping the outside.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; two feet might feed three or four at breakfast. The dish is rich and gluey by nature and wants something sharp alongside -- mustard, pepper vinegar or hot sauce.
- The cooking liquidWhat is left in the pot is strong gelatinous stock. Strained and chilled it sets solid, and it makes an excellent base for soup rather than something to pour away.
Cow heel belongs to the frugal end of nineteenth-century Southern cooking, where a foot cost almost nothing and gave back both meat and gelatin. Before commercial powdered gelatin was cheap and common, calf's foot and cow heel were the standard household source of setting power, boiled down for jellies, blancmanges and invalid broths. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, and its brevity is typical: the contributors were writing for women who already knew how long a foot takes to soften. The same cut survives in dishes across the Caribbean and West Africa, and in Lancashire cow heel pie, all of them built on the same slow conversion of tough tendon into something soft and sticky.