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Calf's-Feet Jelly
Secure an unskinned calf's foot, cut it through the joints, chop the long bone and take away the fat; wash it well, place it in a saucepan, cover with cold water and boil for ten minutes. Strain off the water and wash it again. Put it in an enamelled saucepan, cover it entirely with cold water and wash it again. Put it in an enamelled saucepan, cover it entirely with cold water and stew it gently for six hours, skimming it constantly. When done, drain the stock into a basin, allow it to get cold, and then skim off the fat. In using the jelly be careful not to mix the sediment with it.
This is not a dessert but a base: unflavoured gelatin stock, to be sweetened, acidulated and clarified later. Read it as the first half of a two-part operation.
- A garbled lineThe text repeats "cover it entirely with cold water and wash it again. Put it in an enamelled saucepan" — a typesetting slip. The sequence is: blanch ten minutes, drain and rinse, then return to a clean pan with fresh cold water for the long stew.
- Sourcing the footAn unskinned calf's foot is a special order from a halal or Latin American butcher, or from a farm supplier. Ask for it split; chopping the long bone helps the foot fit the pan and exposes more of the interior to the water, and a bandsaw does it better than a home cleaver.
- Why enamelledBare iron or unlined copper discolours a pale jelly and can give it a metallic edge. Stainless steel or a modern enamelled pot both answer.
- Gentle is literalA bare tremble, not a simmer. A rolling boil works the fat back into the stock and clouds it; later clarification with egg white will help, but it is easier not to cloud it in the first place.
- Six hours, and the sedimentThe long extraction is what converts collagen to gelatin; do not shorten it. Ladle the stock out rather than pouring, and stop well above the murky layer at the bottom — the closing warning is the hinge of the whole recipe.
- Testing the setChill a spoonful on a saucer. If it is only syrupy rather than firm, reduce the stock further before chilling.
- Fat capOnce cold the fat lifts off in a disc. Wipe the surface of the jelly with a cloth dipped in hot water to take the last film, or it will bloom greasy on the finished dish.
- What comes nextTo finish as a table jelly, melt the stock and clarify with egg white and shell, then add sugar, lemon and sherry or Madeira to taste before straining through a jelly bag. Keep the raw stock refrigerated and use within three days, or freeze it.
Calf's-feet jelly was the workhorse of the nineteenth-century larder: one of the standard sources of gelatin, alongside isinglass and hartshorn, before commercial leaf and powdered gelatin became cheap and widely trusted, and the foundation of wine jellies, aspics, blancmanges and charlottes. It was also invalid food, spooned out to convalescents in Victorian novels and nursing manuals as something nourishing that a weak stomach would accept. That Oscar Tschirky includes it in a 1896 hotel book shows the transition mid-stride: the kitchen rendered its own gelatin from bone and skin, though packaged granulated gelatin was already on the American market and would displace this six-hour job within a generation. The instruction to keep the sediment out of the finished jelly is a familiar one in cookery writing of the period, domestic as well as professional: clarity was the whole point of a moulded jelly on a hotel buffet.