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Cow-Heel Baked in Milk
51218. Clean well a cow-heel, and put it with two quarts of milk into an earthen jar; let it stand in a slow oven for five or six hours. The heel may be taken out, and served with a little parsley and butter, or eaten with mustard and vinegar; and the milk, which resembles blancmange, skimmed when cold, then melted and flavoured, as in the above receipt.
A two-in-one dish: the long slow bake yields both a soft, gelatinous meat course and a naturally set milk pudding from the gelatin drawn out of the foot. Nothing here is difficult, but almost everything depends on the oven staying low.
- What a cow-heel isThe foot of a cow or ox, sold split and scalded. Ask a halal or Caribbean butcher for ox foot, or a traditional butcher for cow heel; calf's foot works the same way and is milder. One heel is roughly 1.5-2 lb bone-in.
- Cleaning"Clean well" means more than a rinse. Scrub the skin, pull out any remaining hair with tweezers or singe it, then blanch the heel in boiling water for five minutes and rinse before it goes into the milk. Blanching is the usual precaution against scum and a barnyard note in the milk.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is generally taken as somewhere around 250-300F; err at the lower end. Keep the milk well below a boil, which also helps it stay smooth. Five to six hours is right; the meat should slip off the bone.
- The earthen jarAny deep, lidded, ovenproof pot -- a stoneware bean pot, a Dutch oven, a covered casserole. Cover it. Two quarts of milk in an uncovered dish will reduce and skin over.
- The milkUse whole milk. Skimmed or ultra-filtered milk gives a thin result, and the recipe depends on the fat rising as a skimmable cap once cold. Two quarts is roughly 2.3 litres by imperial measure (about 1.9 by US).
- Skimming and flavouringChill the strained milk overnight; lift off the solid fat cap, then warm the jelly gently to melt it and stir in sugar and flavouring -- almond, lemon peel, orange-flower water, a little brandy -- before pouring into a mould to set again. The cross-referenced "above receipt" is not reproduced here; any standard blancmange flavouring will serve.
- Serving the heelWarm, with melted butter and chopped parsley, or with mustard and vinegar as the text says. At a guess one heel feeds two as a main course, and two quarts of set milk would make six to eight small puddings.
- Texture warningThe set is firm and rubbery by modern standards -- foot gelatin is strong. If it sets too stiffly to be pleasant, the likeliest cause is that the milk has reduced too far.
Cow heel was one of the cheapest sources of gelatin in a British kitchen before packet gelatine became common in the later nineteenth century, and cookery books of the period lean on calf's foot and cow heel constantly for jellies, blancmanges and invalid broths. The double use here -- meat for the table, the milk for a pudding -- is characteristic of household economy writing, where nothing bought was expected to yield only one dish. Cow heel also had a strong regional life of its own: tripe-and-cow-heel shops were a fixture of Lancashire and the West Riding well into the twentieth century, and heel was eaten there much as this recipe suggests, cold with vinegar and mustard. The milk pudding, meanwhile, belongs to the older tradition of restorative food for the sick, in which slowly extracted animal gelatin was thought particularly nourishing.