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To Make Souse from Hog's Feet
As soon as the hog is cleaned, cut off the feet and throw them in a tub of cold water with a handful of salt; let them remain covered in water until you are ready to clean them, which should be done as soon as possible, as they will be much whiter. To get the hoof off, put the feet in hot water (not above the hoof); as soon as they get hot enough, slip a knife between the foot and hoof, and slip it off; then scrape the foot nicely, and throw into a tub of clear water; do this for several days. When you have scraped and changed the water for a week, then wash them clean and put them on to boil. First put them in a clean pot with a thin gruel made of corn meal; boil until half done. Wash them off, and put on in clear hot water, and boil till done, then take them up and throw them into a firkin of clean salt and water; keep closely covered to prevent them from molding. They are now ready to fry, which should be done by splitting the foot in half and fried in egg batter.--Mrs. P. W.
This is a hog-killing-day procedure from a period when a cold house, a cold spring, and November weather did the work a refrigerator does now. Several steps in it are outside the range of what can be done safely in a modern kitchen, and the text is worth reading as a record rather than as instructions.
- The week of standing waterRaw trotters are scraped and left in tubs of "clear water" with daily changes for a week before any cooking. Hog-killing was normally done in cold weather, so the water was presumably cold, but the recipe itself gives no temperature at all. At any temperature above about 40F this is a week of incubation for Salmonella, Yersinia enterocolitica and spoilage organisms on raw pork, and whatever the original conditions were, they cannot be reproduced in a modern indoor kitchen.
- The firkin of salt and waterA firkin is a small wooden cask, nominally nine gallons, though the word was used loosely for small casks and tubs. The cooked feet are dropped into unmeasured "salt and water" and held there, with mold the only spoilage the writer worries about. Brine strong enough to preserve boiled meat at room temperature has to be measured and tested; an unspecified handful-and-guess brine in a wooden cask is an uncontrolled cure, and the risk is not mold but anaerobic bacteria in the depths of the cask.
- No acid, despite the nameMany souse recipes finish the meat in vinegar, which does real preservative work. This one uses plain salt water, so the version here lacks even the modest acid barrier its cousins relied on. If you want souse, use a current tested recipe with weighed salt and measured vinegar.
- "Boil until half done" in meal gruelThe first boil is in a thin cornmeal porridge, a traditional trick said to draw out residual scurf and off-flavors and to whiten the skin. The feet are then washed and boiled again in clear water. Neither stage is timed, and collagen-heavy trotters want three to four hours to become tender, so "till done" conceals a long cook.
- Egg batter and the fryThe final step, splitting the foot in half and frying it in egg batter, is the only part of the process that is ordinary cookery.
- The hoofStanding the feet in hot water only as deep as the hoof loosens the horn without cooking the skin below it, and the recipe then slips a knife between foot and hoof to take it off. Trotters today are generally sold cleaned and usually dehoofed, which removes much of the first half of this recipe.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like the "Mrs. P. W." here, belongs to the era when a household killed its own hogs and had to find a use for every part within days. Souse is the English name for pickled pork scraps, generally traced to Old French souse or sous, meaning pickle or brine, and the word survives in the verb to souse, to steep in liquid. Feet, ears and head went into it because they are almost pure collagen and skin: cheap and gelatinous, but delicious once boiled soft and either set into a jellied loaf or, as here, kept in brine and fried to order. The recipe returns again and again to whiteness -- clean water, quick scraping, daily changes -- and the cornmeal gruel belongs to the same concern.