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Boiled Calf's Feet
Split each of three feet into halves and, after removing the large bones, put them to soak in fresh water for one hour. Wash thoroughly, drain and place them in a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of flour and three or four quarts of water. Stir well; add one gill of vinegar, one onion, one carrot (all cut into shreds), twelve whole peppers, a handful of salt and a bunch of garnished parsley, and cook briskly for an hour and a half. Drain thoroughly, and serve with any kind of sauce.
A classic blanc — the flour-and-vinegar bath that keeps pale offal white while it simmers. The method is sound; the seasoning and the timing both need a second look.
- The hinge: flour and acidThe flour and vinegar are not flavouring. They make a blanc, a cloudy cooking liquor that shields the gelatinous skin from air and keeps it ivory rather than grey. Whisk the flour into a little cold water first, or it will sit in lumps on the bottom and scorch.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The recipe does not say which vinegar; any plain sharp vinegar answers.
- A handful of saltWritten for a stockpot of three or four quarts and a cook who would drain everything away. Even so, a modern handful is excessive; about a tablespoon per quart is enough, and the feet are drained before serving so the liquor is discarded.
- Cook briskly for an hour and a halfUnderestimated for most feet sold today. Calf's feet want a bare shiver for two and a half to three hours, until the skin yields to a fork and slips from the remaining small bones. A hard boil clouds the blanc and shreds the gelatinous membrane.
- Removing the large bonesAsk the butcher to split the feet lengthwise and remove the long bone; it is awkward work with a domestic knife. Calf's feet are a special order almost everywhere and are often sold frozen, blanched and cleaned already.
- Garnished parsleyOscar's phrase for a bouquet garni: parsley stems tied with thyme and a bay leaf, and often a leek green wrapped round the lot.
- Twelve whole peppersTwelve black peppercorns. Tie them into the bouquet or a scrap of muslin so they do not end up in the drained feet.
- Any kind of sauceSauce poulette, a mustard vinaigrette or ravigote all suit. Serve hot straight from the draining, as the gelatin sets fast and stiff once it cools.
- YieldThree feet, split, serve four to six as a course.
Calf's feet were kitchen currency long before packet gelatin, valued less as meat than as the household source of setting power — calf's-foot jelly was the standard invalid food of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks from Hannah Glasse onward assume every cook knows how to draw it. That Oscar Tschirky includes the feet as a dish in their own right, boiled in a blanc and finished with a sauce, marks the French side of the Waldorf kitchen: in Paris the same treatment produced pieds de veau à la poulette and the vinaigrette-dressed cold plate found in bouillon restaurants. The blanc itself is a professional technique, used equally for brains, sweetbreads and cardoons, and its whole purpose is cosmetic — a gentleman's table in 1896 wanted these things white. Commercial powdered gelatin, already on the American market by the time this book appeared, would gradually make the feet redundant, and with them a whole class of dish.