Pig's Pettitoes
-INGREDIENTS.- 2 pettitoes, a thin slice of bacon, 1 onion, 1 blade of mace, 6 peppercorns, 3 or 4 sprigs of thyme, 1 pint of gravy, pepper and salt to taste, thickening of butter and flour.
Put the liver, heart and pettitoes into a stewpan with the bacon, mace, peppercorns, thyme, onion and gravy, and simmer these gently for 1/4 hour; then take out the heart and liver, and mince them very fine.
Keep stewing the feet until quite tender, which will be in from 20 minutes to 1/2 hour, reckoning from the time that they boiled up first; then put back the minced liver, thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour, season with pepper and salt, and simmer over a gentle fire for 5 minutes occasionally stirring the contents. Dish the mince, split the feet, and arrange them round alternately with sippets of toasted bread, and pour the gravy in the middle.
TIME.-Altogether, 40 minutes.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
A dish built around the pluck and feet of a suckling pig, which is why the cooking time looks impossibly short. Read the timings as belonging to a very young animal and adjust before anything else.
- The stray first line"into two precisely equal and similar parts" is the tail end of the preceding entry in the book, not part of this recipe. Ignore it.
- What pettitoes arePig's trotters, and in older usage the feet together with the heart, liver and lights of a sucking pig — which is why liver and heart appear in the method but not in the ingredient list. A butcher will supply trotters and pig's liver and heart separately.
- The timing will not work on adult trottersTwenty to thirty minutes tenderises the feet of a suckling pig only. Trotters from a market-weight pig need 2 1/2 to 3 hours of gentle simmering before the skin and connective tissue soften; test that the bones pull free easily.
- The liver and heartThey come out after 15 minutes for a reason — liver turns granular and bitter if stewed on. If you are cooking adult trotters for hours, add the liver and heart only in the last quarter hour, then lift and mince them.
- GravyA pint (20 fl oz / about 2 1/2 US cups) of brown stock, not modern thickened gravy. Unsalted stock is better here, since the bacon adds salt.
- Thickening of butter and flourBeurre manié: about 15 g each of soft butter and plain flour worked to a paste, whisked in off the boil and simmered five minutes to cook out the flour.
- Blade of maceA piece of the dried outer casing of nutmeg, still sold whole in some spice shops. About 1/4 teaspoon ground mace substitutes, though it will cloud the gravy.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted bread, arranged as a border round the dish, where they soak up the gravy.
- YieldTwo pettitoes with the mince serves two as a supper dish, or three or four as part of a larger meal.
Pettitoes is one of the older surviving English words for pig's feet, recorded from the sixteenth century. It is popularly traced to French petits pieds, but that is folk etymology: the usual scholarly derivation is from Middle French petite oie, the giblets of a goose, later reshaped in English as 'petty toes'. That older, wider sense - the pluck as well as the feet of a sucking pig - explains the heart and liver arriving unannounced in Beeton's method. The dish belongs to the thrift end of the Victorian kitchen, where a pig yielded nothing that could not be eaten and the gelatine in the feet was valued for the body it gave a sauce. Its season, September to March, corresponds to the old autumn and winter pig-killing calendar. Trotters fell out of English domestic fashion in the twentieth century and have since returned by way of restaurant cooking, where the same gelatine is prized.