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Grilled Calf's Feet
Remove all the bones from a blanched calf's foot, cut the flesh into rather small pieces, egg and breadcrumb them and grill until they are of a light brown, then serve.
Two lines of text that assume a great deal of prior work. The dish is really a way of using calf's feet that have already been cooked down until tender, and everything depends on that first step.
- "Blanched" means far more than a quick dipCalf's feet were generally split, scalded, scraped and then simmered at length, often in a court-bouillon or blanc (water with flour, lemon and salt), until the flesh slipped from the bone; several hours is usual. A brief blanching alone leaves the meat rubbery; if the feet do not fall apart under a fork, they are not ready to bone.
- "Grill" here means broil or gridiron"Grill" here means broil or gridiron rather than bake. A domestic broiler set high, or a ridged pan, does the same job. The pieces are already cooked through, so you are only crisping the crumb coat to light brown, a few minutes a side.
- Sourcing the feetCalf's feet are a special order from a butcher and often arrive whole and unscalded. The recipe calls for one foot; a foot yields a modest amount of meat and skin, so judge quantity by appetite. Pig's trotters are the usual modern substitute and behave similarly.
- The gelatin problemThe flesh of a calf's foot is largely collagen, which sets firm once cold. Bone and cut the pieces while the meat is still warm, or press it flat between two trays and chill, then cut into neat squares. Cold, set pieces crumb far more cleanly than warm sticky ones.
- Egg and breadcrumbFlour first, then beaten egg, then dry fine crumbs; without the flour the egg slides off gelatinous skin. Chilling the crumbed pieces for twenty minutes before grilling keeps the coating from sloughing.
- What is missing: the sauceThe recipe stops at the plate, but gelatinous grilled cuts were commonly served with something sharp: mustard, sauce tartare, sauce piquante or a plain vinaigrette to cut the richness. Related preparations often brush the pieces with mustard before crumbing.
- YieldThe recipe specifies one foot; treat it as a starter or light portion, alongside something acid such as a pickled salad.
Oscar Tschirky was never the chef of the Waldorf but its ma u00eetre d'h u00f4tel, and the 1896 book that carries his name is essentially a record of what the hotel's kitchens sent out, written in the brisk shorthand of cooks who already knew the method. This dish belongs to a family of French preparations for gelatinous cuts u2014 the u00e0 la Sainte-Menehould treatment, best known in its pig's-trotter form as pieds de porc, being the obvious relative u2014 in which a long-simmered foot or trotter is boned, coated in crumbs and browned to give some texture to what is otherwise soft and sticky. Calf's feet were cheap and plentiful in a period when whole animals were broken down close to the table, and they served the household twice over: the same feet that produced this grill also produced calf's-foot jelly, the standard invalid food of the nineteenth century, which is why so many books of the era treat them as a staple rather than an oddity.