Cow Heel
As soon as the beef is killed, throw the feet in cold water, and let them remain during the night. In the morning, put them into a pot of cold water and let them boil until you find you can easily take off the hair and the hoof with a knife; take care as the water boils away to replenish with boiling water. Have ready strong brine, not boiled nor strong enough to bear an egg, and the moment the feet are stripped, throw them in. Let them stand one night and in the morning pour the brine from them and put to them a fresh brine, with a small quantity of vinegar. In a day or two, they are fit for use.--Mrs. R.
This is not a dish so much as a butchery-and-holding procedure from a household that killed its own beef, and it depends on conditions no modern kitchen has. The terms are worth understanding, but the method should not be followed.
- What a cow heel isThe lower foot of a beef animal, hoof and all, sold today already scalded, dehaired and split as "cow heel" or "beef foot" at halal, Caribbean and West African butchers. Nothing in this recipe describes cooking it to eat; it is a preparation for later use, chiefly in jellies, soups and brawn.
- Why the cautionThe whole method is an unmeasured salt cure of cooked meat held at ambient temperature for several days. There is no stated salt concentration, no temperature, no acidity target and no refrigeration. Cured-meat safety depends on all four being controlled, and none of them are here.
- "Not strong enough to bear an egg"An old test for brine strength was whether a fresh egg floated in it, which indicates a strong brine, though not necessarily a saturated one. Mrs. R. deliberately calls for something weaker than that, which is the range in which spoilage and pathogenic organisms can remain active. The instruction tells you the brine is too weak to preserve without cold.
- The second brinePouring off the first brine and replacing it with a fresh one, soured with a little vinegar, reads as a spoilage-management step rather than a safety step. The vinegar quantity is unspecified and would not bring the liquid anywhere near a reliably acidified pH.
- The missing cold chain"As soon as the beef is killed" assumes home slaughter and, presumably, cool weather and an unheated larder, with use within days. A modern kitchen at 68-72F reproduces none of that, and the recipe gives no instruction that compensates for it.
- If you want cow heelBuy it cleaned from a butcher and follow a current recipe for cooking it. Treat this page as a record of how the job was done on the farm, not as working instructions.
Cow heel earned its place in Virginia kitchens because of what it yields rather than what it tastes like: the feet are rich in collagen, and long boiling turns them into the gelatin that set calf's-foot jelly, stiffened brawn and souse, and gave body to soups. Before packaged gelatin was cheap and common, a cook who wanted a jelly, whether a savoury moulded dish or an invalid's wine jelly, generally had to start with feet. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end in an initial like Mrs. R., and its readership still largely lived where beef was killed at home. That assumption runs through the recipe: it opens at the moment of slaughter, takes for granted that the hair and hoof are still on, and expects the cool weather that made an unmeasured brine workable. Dishes built on cow heel survive today mainly outside the Anglo-American mainstream, in Caribbean cow foot soup, Nigerian pepper soup and northern English tripe-and-heel cookery, where the same collagen is still the point.