Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Calf's Feet Fritters
Calf's Feet Fritters
Cut into thick slices some boiled calf's feet, dip them into beaten egg, roll them in breadcrumbs and fry in boiling fat to a light brown. Fry some slices of onions, place them in the center of a hot dish, arrange the pieces of feet around, and serve, or they may be garnished with fried parsley.
Oscar assumes a kitchen with a stockpot always going and boiled calf's feet already on hand, which is the one step the recipe skips entirely. Everything else is straightforward crumbing and deep frying.
- The feet have to be cooked firstSplit calf's feet need 2½ to 3½ hours at a bare simmer with aromatics until the meat and skin slip from the bone. Pull the bones out while warm; what remains is skin, cartilage and gelatinous meat.
- Chill before slicingWarm calf's foot is soft and awkward to slice or crumb. One way to handle it is to press the boned meat into a loaf pan, weight it and refrigerate until it sets firm from its own gelatin, then cut the thick slices the recipe asks for; the recipe itself says nothing about pressing or chilling.
- SourcingCalf's feet are a special order from a halal, kosher or old-style butcher, sometimes sold split and frozen. Pig's trotters behave the same way and are far easier to find, though the flavour is stronger.
- "Boiling fat"Period phrasing for deep fat hot enough to bubble hard around whatever goes in; in modern terms somewhere around 350–375°F. The interior is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust — fry just until light brown, a couple of minutes a side.
- BreadcrumbsThe recipe specifies nothing beyond breadcrumbs; dry, fairly fine crumbs suit the job. A light dusting of flour first helps the egg grip the gelatinous surface.
- Fried parsleySprigs, thoroughly dried, dropped into the same fat for 15 to 20 seconds until crisp and still green. Wet parsley will spit; dry it on a towel.
- The onionsThe recipe says only to fry sliced onions; it does not specify the fat or how far to take them. Cooked gently until soft and gold they make a sweet bed under the fritters, rather than the crisp battered rings the phrase suggests today.
- YieldFour calf's feet give roughly enough set meat for six as a first course. Serve hot with mustard, a sharp rémoulade or a squeeze of lemon; the richness needs acid.
Calf's foot was a workhorse of nineteenth-century cookery for one reason: gelatin. Before commercial leaf and powdered gelatin became cheap and reliable, feet were simmered down for the jellies, aspics and blancmanges that structured a formal menu, and calf's-foot jelly was the standard invalid food prescribed to convalescents on both sides of the Atlantic. This fritter is the thrifty other half of that economy — once the foot has been boiled, the meat and skin are still there, and setting them firm, crumbing them and frying them turns a by-product into a garnished dish fit for the Waldorf's dining room. Frying breaded slices of set gelatinous meat is a technique with deep roots in French kitchen practice, where the same treatment is given to tripe, brains and pig's trotters, and Oscar Tschirky's book is full of such transplants: hotel cooking in 1896 New York was French cooking, written down in plain English for an American reader.