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Calf's Feet with Poulette Sauce
Same as boiled calf's feet, adding one-half pint of poulette sauce, made as follows: Put one pint of hot German sauce into a saucepan with one ounce of fresh butter, add the juice of one-half of a medium-sized lemon, and one teaspoonful of chopped parsley. Heat thoroughly on a hot stove until well melted and mixed, but do not allow it to boil. Keep the sauce warm, and serve poured over the calf's feet on a dish.
A short finishing sauce that depends entirely on a mother sauce the book assumes you already have on the stove. The calf's feet themselves are the long part of the job.
- Never let it boilGerman sauce (sauce allemande) is a velouté finished with egg yolks and cream. Bringing it to a boil after the liaison goes in will curdle the yolks and break the sauce. Hold it below a simmer, around 175F, and warm it just until the butter melts in.
- What "German sauce" isSauce allemande: a veal or chicken velouté reduced with mushroom liquor and thickened off the heat with egg yolks and cream, then strained. In France the name was widely displaced by sauce parisienne around the First World War. A well-made chicken velouté finished with two yolks beaten into a few tablespoons of cream per pint is the working equivalent.
- MeasuresOne pint is 16 fl oz (2 cups); the half pint of finished sauce called for is 1 cup. One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons.
- Butter goes in last and coldButter -- The recipe adds the ounce of butter to the hot sauce at the outset, before the lemon and parsley, and asks only that it melt and mix without boiling. Modern practice would more often swirl cold butter in at the end for gloss.
- LemonHalf a medium lemon gives roughly 1 tablespoon of juice. Add it to taste at the finish; acid added early and held hot encourages the yolks to tighten.
- Sourcing calf's feetNot a supermarket item. Order from a halal or Latin American butcher, or one who breaks whole carcasses; pig's trotters are the common substitute but give a heavier, fattier gelatin. Blanch, then simmer 3 to 4 hours until the meat pulls from the bone.
- ServingThe recipe pours the sauce over the feet on the dish before serving. The feet are rich and set to jelly as they cool, so plate them hot on warmed dishes.
Sauce poulette is a small sauce of the French classical repertoire, a velouté-based allemande sharpened with lemon and parsley; the name is generally traced to its early association with chicken cookery, though by the nineteenth century it was attached above all to boiled offal and to mushrooms. Its most famous partner in Paris was sheep's trotters, sold ready-cooked by tripiers and reheated in the sauce at home. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, catalogues that repertoire for an American readership that expected French service in a New York hotel: the entry does not even restate the sauce's base, assuming the reader can turn back to German sauce and to boiled calf's feet elsewhere in the volume. Calf's feet were then a staple of both the grand kitchen and the sickroom, valued for the gelatin that also went into calf's-foot jelly.