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Calf's Foot Jelly
½ cup lemon juice cup sugar 3 egg whites Cook the calf's foot in cold water, slowly, for four hours. Skim often while cooking. Strain; let stand over night. Remove fat; add whites of eggs slightly beaten, and bring slowly to the boiling point; boil one minute, strain through cheese cloth, add remaining ingredients, and pour into molds. Chill and serve. 2 egg whites ½ cup powdered sugar
The printed text is garbled: the ingredient list is missing the calf's foot itself and the sugar quantity, and it repeats with a second, smaller set of egg whites and sugar. Read it as a method rather than a formula, and treat the amounts below as the working proportions.
- What is actually missingThe list omits the calf's foot (one large split foot, or two small, to about 2 quarts of cold water) and gives no figure for the sugar in the first line. The trailing "2 egg whites, ½ cup powdered sugar" is almost certainly a separate meringue or a duplicated setting, not part of the jelly.
- Sourcing the footSplit calf's foot is a butcher order now, not a case item. Ask for it split lengthwise so the marrow and connective tissue are exposed; unsplit, it gives up its gelatin far more slowly.
- If you use gelatin insteadA quart of strained calf's-foot stock can be approximated by a quart of liquid set with about 4 to 5 teaspoons of powdered gelatin. The flavor is not the same -- the foot brings a faint meatiness, which the lemon and sugar here (and the sherry found in many other versions) help to mask.
- The four-hour simmerSlowly means barely trembling, never a rolling boil. Hard boiling emulsifies the fat back into the liquid and clouds the stock past any hope of clarifying.
- The hinge: clarifyingOnce the beaten whites go in, bring the pot up gently and stop stirring as soon as it begins to move. The whites must rise as an intact raft and trap the sediment; break it up and the jelly is ruined. Ladle the liquid out from under the raft rather than pouring the pot through the cloth.
- StrainingCheesecloth alone passes fine haze. Line the sieve with several layers, or use a dampened jelly bag, and let it drip without squeezing.
- Order of additionsModern practice adds the lemon juice and sugar before clarifying, not after "" the acid helps the raft coagulate, and stirring them into finished jelly reintroduces particles you have just removed. Warm the jelly slightly to dissolve the sugar if you follow the original order.
- SettingChill at least six hours, preferably overnight, in wetted molds. Unmold by dipping the mold to the rim in warm water for a count of five.
- YieldAbout a quart, or six to eight small molds. Once set, keep refrigerated and eat within three days.
Calf's-foot jelly was the standard invalid food of the nineteenth-century English-speaking household "" light, nourishing in the reasoning of the day, and easy for a sick person to swallow. It appears in many general cookbooks from Hannah Glasse onward, usually in a chapter on cookery for the sick, and it is why so many old novels have a neighbor arriving at a sickbed with a covered basin. The technique is medieval in origin: gelatin was extracted from feet, hides and calves' heads long before it was sold dried, and clarifying with egg white is the same raft method used for consommé.