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Fricasseed Pig's Feet and Ears
Clean and wash the feet and ears of a pig, cut them up in small pieces, put them in a saucepan with one pint of milk, and boil for an hour. Strain off the liquor, and put the pieces of meat in another saucepan, add a breakfast cupful of veal broth, a small onion, the peel of half a lemon, and a little powdered mace. Simmer over a slow fire until well done, then mix in one gill of cream, one ounce of butter well rolled in flour, and one saltspoonful of salt, warm up again, turn all on to a dish, and serve very hot.
A white fricassee of the sort that once used every part of the animal. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows that trotters take a long time to soften, which is the one thing it does not say.
- The hinge: cook the feet until truly tenderAn hour in milk is unlikely to do it on its own. Split pig's feet may want two to three hours of gentle simmering before the collagen breaks down and the meat comes away from the bone, though pieces cut as small as this recipe directs will soften sooner, and ears sooner still. The recipe's own instruction to simmer 'until well done' in the broth is where most of that time belongs; test with a knife tip rather than the clock.
- Milk scorchesMilk over direct heat for an hour will catch and film unless the pan is heavy and the heat kept at a bare tremble. Stir up from the bottom periodically. The strained milk is discarded, so its job is only to whiten the meat and pull off strong flavours.
- SourcingAsk a butcher for trotters split lengthwise and for cleaned ears; both are cheap and often frozen. Ears need singeing or close shaving, and both should be scrubbed in several changes of cold water, which is what "clean and wash" is doing here.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup. A breakfast cupful is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so a generous cup of veal broth. A saltspoonful is about ¼ teaspoon, and an ounce of butter is two tablespoons.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: soft butter kneaded with an equal volume of flour, about two tablespoons of each, dropped in in small pieces and whisked until the sauce coats a spoon. Add it off the boil and warm through gently, as the recipe says, so the flour cooks out without splitting the cream.
- Mace and lemon peelPowdered mace loses its aroma fast; buy it in small quantity or grate it from blades. Use only the yellow zest of the lemon in a wide strip so it can be fished out before serving, and go lightly, perhaps ⅛ teaspoon of mace, since both flavourings are meant to lift the richness, not dominate it.
- Veal brothA light unsalted veal or chicken stock is right; anything dark or heavily reduced will muddy a dish that is supposed to stay pale. Salt at the end, as directed, since the reduction concentrates whatever is already in the broth.
- Yield and servingThe recipe names no quantity of meat, so judge by the liquid: a pint of milk and a cupful of broth suit a modest amount, enough for two or three as a first course, with plain boiled potatoes or rice to take the sauce. It must go out very hot: the gelatin sets quickly and a cooling plate turns tacky.
Fricassee in this sense is the older French and English usage: meat cut small, cooked in liquid, finished with cream and a butter-and-flour thickening, and kept white rather than browned. Pig's trotters and ears were staples of nineteenth-century economy cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, valued for the gelatin that gives a sauce body without any other help, and a preliminary boil in milk is a traditional way of blanching offal and taking the edge off its flavour. Mace and lemon peel as the seasoning for white meats is an eighteenth-century English habit that persisted in American cookery well into the later nineteenth century.