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To Fry Beef Heel
Have a batter made of eggs, flour, etc., as for tripe. Split the feet into convenient shapes and fry in hot lard. Pour some vinegar over them while frying.--Mrs. P. W.
A fragment of a recipe that assumes you have already read the tripe and calf's-foot entries a few pages earlier. Beef heel means the foot of the animal, and everything depends on what happens before the frying pan comes out.
- The feet must be boiled firstNothing in this line says so, because the book assumes it: cow heel is collagen and bone, and needs three to four hours at a bare simmer until the meat and gelatinous tissue slip from the bone. Frying raw or half-cooked foot produces something inedible. Cool the boiled feet completely before battering, so they hold together in the fat.
- What to buyAsk a butcher for beef feet, cow heel or trotters, split lengthwise. Halal and Caribbean butchers carry them reliably; supermarkets almost never do. Two feet feed three or four people as a main dish.
- "A batter as for tripe"The line points back to the book's tripe batter and itself specifies only eggs and flour. A plain coating batter of flour, egg and enough milk or water to reach the thickness of heavy cream, with salt and pepper, is the usual nineteenth-century form. It is a dipping batter, not a leavened one.
- Hot lardShallow-fry in about half an inch of lard, hot but not smoking; the book gives no temperature, and around 350F on a modern thermometer answers to it. The pieces are already cooked, so you are only browning the batter, three or four minutes a side. Lard suits this dish and behaves better than butter at that heat; a neutral oil works if lard is unavailable.
- The vinegarPoured over the pieces in the pan, cider or malt vinegar cuts the gelatin's richness and hisses off almost at once. Add it in the last minute, off the direct heat if the fat is very hot, and use a spoonful or two rather than a stream, or the batter will sog.
- Split into convenient shapesAfter boiling, split or cut the feet into pieces you can handle, two or three inches or so. Lifting the meat and soft tissue off the bone first is an option: bone-in pieces spit in hot fat and are awkward to eat.
- ServingSend it to the table hot; more vinegar, mustard or a sharp sauce suits it, though the recipe says nothing about serving. It sets to a firm jelly as it cools, so it does not hold well and is best not made ahead.
Beef heel, cow heel, neat's foot: the foot of the ox was one of the cheapest things a butcher sold, and its value lay in gelatin rather than meat. Long boiling drew that gelatin out for jellies, brawns and calf's-foot jelly for invalids, and the softened meat left behind was too good to waste, so it was battered and fried. Recipes of this kind cluster in nineteenth-century American cookbooks alongside tripe, chitterlings and pig's feet, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, prints them as a matter of course, each signed with a contributor's initials. The brevity here is characteristic of the genre: written by cooks for cooks who already knew the preliminary boiling.