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Broiled Pigs' Feet
Wipe, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and broil six to eight minutes. Serve with Maître d'Hôtel Butter or Sauce Piquante.
Two lines of instruction that assume something the book states elsewhere: the feet are already cooked. Read this as a finishing method, not a cooking method.
- The feet must be cooked firstSix to eight minutes under a broiler will not cook a raw pig's foot; it is mostly skin, bone and collagen and needs long, gentle simmering until a skewer slides through easily. Feet were also sold ready-boiled or in vinegar pickle in this period, which may be why the recipe can begin at "wipe."
- Split themHalve each cooked foot lengthwise so there is a flat cut face to sit against the heat. Whole, they are round and will scorch on one side while staying cold in the middle.
- Chill before broilingCooked feet set firm and gelatinous when cold, which is what lets them hold shape under high heat. Broil straight from the refrigerator, blotted dry — surface moisture is the enemy of browning.
- HeatA hot broiler with the rack close, turning once. You want the skin blistered and crisp; the interior only needs warming through.
- Maître d'hôtel butterSoftened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — the book's own recipe. A slice melting over the hot foot is the point of the dish.
- Sauce piquanteA brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and something sour-pickled, along the lines of chopped pickles or capers. Any modern sharp brown sauce serves the same purpose: cutting the richness of the gelatin.
- Sourcing and yieldFresh pigs' feet are still sold cheaply at butchers, Latin American and Asian markets, usually split. Figure one foot per person as a course, two if it is the main event.
Pigs' feet were standard economy meat in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats them the way it treats tripe and calf's head -- as an ordinary cut with several accepted finishes. Ready-boiled and vinegar-pickled feet were also sold commercially, which may help explain why the recipe is so short. Broiling or breading and frying such a foot is a French-inflected move, and the two suggested accompaniments point the same way: maitre d'hotel butter and sauce piquante both belong to the professional French repertoire that the Boston Cooking School was adapting for middle-class households. The dish sits at the meeting point of thrift and refinement: the least expensive part of the pig, dressed as though it came from a hotel kitchen.