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Calf's Feet with Piquant Sauce
The same as for boiled calf's feet, using one-half pint of piquant sauce to pour over.
A one-line cross-reference of the kind that fills Oscar's book: the method lives under the boiled calf's feet entry, and this variation only changes the sauce. What follows fills in what a Waldorf cook of 1896 was assumed to know.
- Half a pint of sauceOne cup. That is a generous coating rather than a pool; piquant sauce is sharp and a little goes a long way.
- What piquant sauce isIn the classical repertoire Oscar was working from, sauce piquante is a reduction of vinegar and white wine with minced shallot, let down with brown sauce or demi-glace and finished with chopped gherkins and parsley; some versions add capers. Add the gherkins and herbs off the heat so they keep their bite.
- Sourcing the feetCalf's feet are a butcher order, not a supermarket item, and they usually arrive whole and unsplit. Ask for them split lengthwise and cleaned; scald and scrape off any remaining hair before cooking.
- The boilingThe cross-referenced method is not given here; boiled calf's feet generally take a long, slow simmer in salted water with an onion, a carrot and a bouquet, roughly two and a half to three hours, until the meat and skin slip easily from the bone. A hard boil will cloud the liquid and shred the gelatinous skin.
- Blanch firstGive the feet five minutes in boiling water and rinse before the main cooking. It removes the scum that otherwise greys the finished dish, which matters here because the pieces are served plainly under sauce.
- ServingBone the feet while still warm, cut the skin and meat into neat pieces, and keep them hot in a little of their cooking liquor until the sauce is ready. Cooled, they set solid with gelatin and are difficult to portion.
- Save the cooking liquorThe strained broth is almost pure gelatin and sets to a firm jelly overnight. It was the standard base for aspic and for calf's-foot jelly, and it freezes well.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was cataloguing a professional repertoire rather than teaching beginners, which is why entries like this one amount to a single line pointing back at another page. Calf's feet were then an ordinary and cheap thing to buy: they gave the gelatin for aspics, jellies and glazes in an era before packaged gelatin was universal, and the meat left over from that extraction was too good to waste. Serving them boiled under a vinegar-sharp sauce piquante is a straightforwardly French treatment, the acid cutting the soft, sticky richness of the skin. The dish belongs to the same family as the tripes, brains and calf's head that fill this section of the book, offal cookery that a grand American hotel still expected to put on the table and that largely left the mainstream menu within two generations.