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Boiled Pig's Tails
Trim and well wash four or five pig's tails, put them in a saucepan of salted water and boil until done. Take them out, drain, wipe them on a cloth, and arrange on a dish over a puree of peas. Put a few chopped mushrooms in a fryingpan with a little butter, and fry till quite brown; put them in a saucepan with a little stock, reduce it, and add the yolks of one or two eggs to thicken. Pour it when ready over the tails, and serve. Veal. Attereaux of Veal and Ham Cut into slices about one-fourth of an inch in thickness a quantity of cold cooked veal and lean ham. Divide these into flat squares about one inch wide each way. String them on small steel or silver skewers, arranging the ham and veal alternately, commencing with a veal square and ending with the same. Dip the attereaux into egg, roll them in breadcrumbs, and fry them for a few minutes. Take them out, arrange on a dish on a folded napkin. Garnish them with sprigs of fried parsley and serve as hot as possible. They are held in the hand by means of a table napkin, and the pieces are taken off the skewer with a fork to be eaten.
Two Waldorf items have run together on this page: boiled pig's tails with a pea puree, and attereaux of veal and ham. Both are straightforward, but each has one step that decides whether it works.
- "Boil until done" means two to three hours"Boil until done" -- Pig's tails are collagen-heavy and want long, gentle cooking; a bare simmer of roughly two to three hours, until the meat yields at the bone, is the usual modern reckoning. A hard boil at full heat will toughen them before the connective tissue breaks down.
- The egg-yolk liaison must not boilOnce the yolks go into the reduced mushroom stock, keep the pan below a simmer and stir until it coats a spoon. At boiling point the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks into grains and liquid, and it cannot be brought back.
- Puree of peasOscar means a thick, seasoned pea puree — dried split peas cooked soft and passed through a sieve, or fresh peas pureed with butter. It should be stiff enough to hold the tails up rather than pool around them.
- Salted waterPig's tails are often sold already brined or cured. Taste one before salting the cooking water heavily, or the finished dish and the reduced sauce will both be over-salted.
- AttereauxThe word simply means small skewers of prepared food, egged, crumbed and fried. "Small steel or silver skewers" were meant to go to the table; short metal skewers work, and wooden ones will scorch in the fat.
- Frying the skewersThe veal and ham are already cooked, so this is only about setting the crumb. The recipe says merely "a few minutes"; in a modern kitchen that means fat hot enough to colour the coating deep gold quickly, two to three minutes. Longer only dries the meat.
- Fried parsleyDry the sprigs thoroughly, then drop them into the hot fat for about 10 seconds until they stop sputtering and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- YieldNeither recipe gives a yield. Four or five tails will do for about two as a course, and the attereaux are counted per skewer -- two or three a person as an entree, one as an hors d'oeuvre, is a workable guess.
Pig's tails belong to the frugal end of the butcher's counter, and their appearance in a Waldorf-Astoria book is a reminder that grand-hotel cooking of the 1890s drew freely on the whole animal, dressing tails, ears and feet up with a puree and an egg-thickened sauce. The attereaux that follow work from the other direction: cold cooked veal and ham cut into neat squares, crumbed, fried and sent out on a folded napkin so a diner could hold the hot skewer by hand. Attereaux -- the name goes back to an old French word for a small spit -- were a standard hors d'oeuvre form in the period, and Escoffier's Guide Culinaire later lists a range of them. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, is the name on the book, which draws on the hotel's repertoire, and that is why entries like these sit beside far more extravagant dishes.