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Broiled Pig's Feet
Boil the feet until tender, cut in halves, brush with melted butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with buttered bread crumbs. Broil over a clear fire and serve with Piquante Sauce.
A two-stage dish: a long, patient simmer, then a fast browning. The recipe assumes you already know the first stage takes hours, so that is the part worth spelling out.
- "Until tender" means 3 to 4 hoursPig's trotters are collagen and bone; a gentle simmer of three to four hours is what turns them tender, and a rolling boil will only shred the skin. A pressure cooker does the same job in about 45 minutes at high pressure.
- Simmer them in somethingThe book leaves the cooking liquid unspecified. Water with a halved onion, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns and a generous spoonful of salt gives far better results, and the strained liquid sets to a firm jelly worth keeping for stock.
- Chill before splittingCool the feet in their liquid, then refrigerate until firm. Warm trotters fall apart under the knife; cold ones split more cleanly lengthwise with a heavy knife or cleaver and hold their shape under the broiler.
- "Broil over a clear fire"A clear fire is coals burned down past the smoke to steady red heat, with no flame licking the food. A gas grill at medium-high or an oven broiler with the rack about 4 inches from the element does the same thing.
- Watch the crumbsButtered bread crumbs colour in two to three minutes a side under a broiler and go from golden to black quickly. The feet are already fully cooked, so the only object is crisp browning.
- Piquante SauceThe period sauce is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar or white wine and finished with chopped shallots, gherkins and capers. Any sharp mustard- or vinegar-based sauce serves the same purpose, which is cutting the richness of the gelatin.
- YieldFigure one whole foot, split, per person as an entrée course, or a half foot each if it is one of several dishes. Four feet will serve four.
Pig's feet belong to the thrifty end of the butcher's counter, and their presence in a cookbook of the period is a reminder that early-twentieth-century American entrée courses drew freely on offal and extremities that home cooks now largely skip. The method here — boil, split, crumb, grill, serve with a sharp sauce — is a standard nineteenth-century treatment, closely related to the French pieds de porc à la Sainte-Menehould, generally traced to the town of Sainte-Menehould in Champagne, where the feet are simmered so long the small bones become edible before being crumbed and browned. The sauce piquante, a brown sauce cut with vinegar and pickled things, is a traditional partner: the gelatinous richness of the foot needs acid opposite it, and the same pairing turns up in period cookbooks for trotters, tripe and calf's head.