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Calf's Foot Jelly
4 calves' feet feet 3 quarts water. Whites of 2 eggs Clean the feet thoroughly and boil them slowly until the three quarts of water are reduced to one. Strain and set away until 1/2 pound powdered sugar 2 lemons cold; remove the grease and place the jelly in a saucepan, being careful to avoid the settlings. Add the sugar, lemon juice and whites of eggs; let all boil together for a few minutes; pour into bowls or glasses and set away to cool. This is much more nourishing than the commercial gelatine.
The loose-leaf page has run its ingredient column into the middle of the method, which is why the eggs and sugar appear mid-sentence. Read it as: 2 calf's feet, 3 quarts water, ½ lb powdered sugar, juice of 2 lemons, whites of 2 eggs.
- The hinge: reduce by two-thirds, slowlyBoiling three quarts down to one at a bare simmer is what concentrates the collagen enough to set without added gelatine. Reckon on several hours, uncovered, at a lazy bubble; a hard boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the stock.
- Sourcing the feetSplit calf's feet are usually a special order from a butcher and are rarely on display. The recipe does not say how many feet, nor what "clean thoroughly" involves beyond scrubbing; a preliminary blanch, discarding that water, is a common modern step but is not specified here.
- Avoiding the settlingsAfter overnight chilling you get three layers: a fat cap, the clear jelly, and a cloudy sediment at the bottom. Lift off the fat, cut out the jelly, and scrape the murky underside away with a spoon rather than tipping the bowl.
- Powdered sugar then and nowIn this period "powdered sugar" meant finely milled granulated sugar, not today's confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch. Use ordinary granulated — ½ lb is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons.
- Clarifying with egg whiteWhisk the whites into the cold or barely warm jelly before heating, not into hot liquid. Bring it up slowly without stirring once it clouds; the coagulated raft traps the haze, and you then strain through a scalded flannel or several layers of cheesecloth without pressing.
- LemonsTwo lemons give roughly 6 tablespoons juice. The recipe uses the juice alone; some cooks also add thinly pared zest during the clarifying boil and strain it out.
- SettingBowls or glasses need four to six hours in the refrigerator, not a cold larder. Calf's-foot jelly sets softer than packet gelatine and melts readily in a warm room, so serve it straight from the cold.
- YieldAbout 1 quart, or six to eight small glasses.
Calf's-foot jelly was a fixture of nineteenth-century invalid cookery: it was food for the sick, the convalescent and the very young, valued as a way of getting concentrated nourishment into someone with no appetite. The technique is simply long extraction of collagen from connective tissue, sweetened and clarified — the ancestor of every packet of gelatine dessert. The closing dig, that it is "much more nourishing than the commercial gelatine," belongs to a period when granulated gelatine had become cheap and reliable. The nutritional claim was widely repeated at the time but does not hold up; gelatine of any origin is an incomplete protein.