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Broiled Pig's Feet
Thoroughly clean as many pig's feet as are required, split them lengthwise in halves, tie them round with broad tape so that they will not open, or shrink in cooking, put them in a saucepan with a seasoning of parsley, thyme, bay leaf, allspice, carrots and onions, with sufficient water to cover, and boil slowly till tender, then let them cool in the liquor. Dip them in beaten yolks of eggs and warmed butter; sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cover with breadcrumbs, seasoned with very finely chopped shallot and parsley. Put them on a gridiron over a clear fire, and broil until well and evenly browned. Unbind and arrange them on a dish and garnish with fried parsley, or they can be served with Robert sauce.
A two-stage dish: a long gentle simmer, then a quick browning. Nearly everything that can go wrong happens in the first stage, so treat the broiling as finishing work rather than cooking.
- The hinge: cool them in the liquorThe feet must be poached until a skewer meets no resistance — figure 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare shiver, never a rolling boil, which shreds the skin off the bone. Leaving them to cool completely in the cooking liquid lets the collagen set and firms the halves so they survive breading and handling.
- Sourcing and cleaningAsk a butcher for fresh feet, scalded and scraped. "Thoroughly clean" in a nineteenth-century kitchen meant singeing off remaining bristles over a flame and scrubbing between the toes; supermarket feet still usually need a pass with a razor or torch.
- SplittingA cleaver through the length of the foot is the traditional method, but the bone is dense and awkward. A butcher will split them in seconds on a bandsaw, and the cut will be cleaner.
- Broad tapeCotton twill tape, sold as a sewing notion. Cheesecloth strips or butcher's twine wound in a spiral do the same job. Do not use anything synthetic, and remember to remove it before serving, as the recipe says at the end.
- AromaticsWhole allspice berries, not ground — six or eight for a pot of four feet. The parsley, thyme and bay are a bouquet garni; tie them so they can be lifted out. The recipe seasons only with the listed aromatics; a good spoonful of salt and a splash of vinegar or white wine in the poaching water are modern additions.
- The egg-and-butter coatYolks alone with warm (not hot) melted butter make a rich, slightly sticky wash. Work with the feet cold and firm, press the crumbs on well, and chill the breaded halves for half an hour so the coating sets before they meet the heat.
- "A clear fire"A gridiron over settled coals with no flame. A modern broiler set to high with the rack about 4 inches down does the same thing in 4 to 6 minutes a side — the interior is already cooked, so you are only browning crumbs. Watch continuously; the butter in the coating burns quickly.
- Robert sauceA classic brown sauce — demi-glace with onions sweated in butter, white wine and a finish of mustard. Any good mustard-sharpened brown sauce serves the same purpose, which is to cut the richness.
- Fried parsley and yieldCurly parsley, dried thoroughly, dropped into 350°F fat for 15 to 20 seconds; wet parsley will spit violently. Count two halves — one whole foot — per person as a course, and expect a fair amount of bone and gristle on the plate.
Pig's feet were a cheap-cuts dish that climbed into the grand hotel repertoire on the strength of French technique rather than French luxury: the *pieds de porc à la Sainte-Menehould* of Champagne, long-simmered then crumbed and grilled, is a clear relative of this preparation, though the classic method simmers far longer, until the bones themselves go soft. That such a dish was served in fine dining rooms at all says something about late-nineteenth-century American dining, where a menu could run from terrapin to broiled offal without apology, so long as the sauce was correct. The Robert sauce named at the end is one of the older French brown sauces, generally traced back to the sixteenth century and standardised in the nineteenth as a demi-glace with onion, white wine and mustard — mustard being the traditional partner to pork feet in France as well. The two-stage method would also have suited a large kitchen: the feet could plausibly be poached and cooled in bulk during the day, then breaded and browned to order in minutes.