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Calf's Feet, Fricasseed
INGREDIENTS. A set of calf's feet; for the batter, allow for each egg 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1 tablespoonful of bread-crumbs, hot lard, or clarified dripping, pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 9d. each.
If the feet are purchased uncleaned, dip them into warm water repeatedly, and scrape off the hair, first one foot and then the other, until the skin looks perfectly clean, a saucepan of water being kept by the fire until they are finished. After wash- ❘ing and soaking in cold water, boil them in just sufficient water to cover them, until CALF'S FEET JELLY. the bones come easily away. Then pick them out, and after straining the liquor into a clean vessel, put the meat into a piedish until the next day. Now cut it down in slices about½ inch thick, lay on them a stiff batter made of egg, flour and breadcrumbs in the above proportion; season with pepper and salt, and plunge them into a pan of boiling lard. Fry the slices a nice brown, dry them before the fire for a minute or two, dish them on a napkin, and garnish with tufts of parsley. This should be eaten with melted butter, mustard and vinegar. Be careful to have the lard boiling to set the batter, or the pieces of feet will run about the pan. The liquor they were boiled in should be saved, and will be found useful for enriching gravies, making jellies, &c.
TIME. About 3 hours to stew the feet, 10 or 15 minutes to fry them.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
Note. This dish can be highly recommended to delicate persons.
A two-day dish: the feet are boiled down one day, sliced and fried the next. The stray lines "SIDE OF A CALF, SHOWING THE INGREDIENTS" and "CALF'S FEET JELLY" are captions from illustrations on the printed page, not instructions.
- The hinge: chill overnightThe sliced meat holds together only because the gelatin in the feet sets firm as it cools. Press the picked meat into the piedish and refrigerate until cold and rubbery-solid; slices cut from anything warmer will collapse in the pan.
- SourcingCalf's feet generally have to be ordered from a butcher, and modern ones usually come already cleaned, which removes the scraping and repeated warm-water dipping. Pig's trotters are the usual substitute and behave much the same way, though the flavour is stronger.
- "A set of calf's feet"Conventionally four feet. The recipe gives no weights and no yield, so any figure for bone-in weight, picked meat or number of servings is guesswork.
- Batter proportionsPer egg, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 tablespoon breadcrumbs. The recipe scales by the egg and does not say how many eggs a set of feet needs. It should be thick enough to cling in a coat rather than run off the slice.
- Frying fat"Boiling lard" means fat at frying heat, 350-375F, not literally boiling. Beeton's warning is sound: below that the batter loosens and the pieces separate. Clarified dripping works identically.
- TimingThree hours' simmering is realistic for feet, and you want the bones to slip out freely. The frying takes far less than the stated 10-15 minutes if the fat is properly hot: 3-4 minutes to a good brown, since everything inside is already cooked.
- Salt the liquor lightlyThe cooking water is saved and reduces to a strong gelatin stock. Season the batter, not the pot, or the resulting jelly or gravy will be too salty to use.
- The sauce"Melted butter" in Victorian usage is a flour-thickened butter sauce, not plain drawn butter. Served with mustard and vinegar alongside, it is closer to a sharp cream sauce than to anything modern menus call melted butter.
- "Seasonable from March to October"A note about calving and market supply in an age without refrigeration; it has no bearing now.
Calf's feet were valued less for their meat than for the gelatin locked in their skin and cartilage, and any Victorian kitchen boiling a set of feet expected two products: the picked meat, and the liquor that set into calf's-foot jelly, the standard invalid food of the century. Hence the closing note that the dish "can be highly recommended to delicate persons" and the instruction never to throw the liquor away. The name is loose: a true fricassee is meat stewed in a white sauce, whereas this is a fritter, the sort of second-day dish that turned a cheap cut into something worth putting on a folded napkin with parsley. The price of ninepence a foot places it firmly among economical purchases in the later editions of Beeton, where the household-management framing survived long after Isabella Beeton's death in 1865 and the text was repeatedly expanded and reset by her publishers.